Lemongrass’ musings

Pat Metheny Orchestrion, originally uploaded by lemon.grass.

I am fairly hooked on Pat Metheny’s music, so I was really looking forward to seeing him live with Orchestrion at the Barbican Centre last night.  The atmosphere was good, and I had one of the best seats in the house, 7 rows back and right in the centre of the stalls.  The technology is fascinating - lots of solenoids controlling mainly acoustic instruments and some electric guitars.  He can control the whole setup from his guitar in almost real time.  It’s a great setup.  OK, so the technology let him down last night near the end of the concert, and his closing number had to be cancelled; that didn’t matter as we were treated to some more familiar pieces instead.  The trouble is that the automated setup has some serious musical limitations which in the end left me feeling that it was frankly boring.  Pat’s act used the orchestrion in two distinct modes: pre-programmed, and live.  In the pre-programmed mode, computers had previously recorded Pat’s playing of the orchestrion, and on stage he soloed as it accompanied.  In the live mode, the automated instruments sounded in response to Pat’s playing, detecting the tones of the notes and playing them on the many percussion and strung instruments in the ensemble.

Player pianos are fascinating devices, as Pat points out, and one can watch them for ages.  But frankly one doesn’t look to them to produce inspiring performances.  What makes an inspiring performance on stage?  The interplay between the players; the way they react to one another and inspire each other to go a bit further; the feeling that we, as members of the audience, are privy to the excitement which flows between the performers.  All that is lost with a pseudo-solo performance like this, and worse, the automaton doesn’t read and react to timing and mood changes in the live performance.  When Pat starts a soulful solo, and then the orchestrion comes in, it often comes in at the wrong speed.  A live backing group would be listening to the soloist and timing their entrance to match his tempo.  The opposite problem occurs when Pat leads the performance in the live mode.  The detection of which notes are playing and the reaction time of the mechanics leads to a noticable lag between the soloist’s performance and the accompaniment.  I did become use to this delay after a while, but it is a serious limitation, compared with multiple performers playing together.

Overall, I found the Orchestrion experience flat and somewhat disappointing.  As he freely admits, it’s an experiment, and he’s feeling his way. The most interesting part of the evening was listening to him talking about how it worked, and demonstrating the machine. He has a very pleasant manner and comes across well. I hope I get the chance to see him performing live with live performers soon, so that I can experience the real music.

Ten or 15 years ago when I used to visit the National Railway Museum in York very often, I was very excited about the realtime railway signalling display they had installed on a balcony overlooking the East Coast Main Line which runs past the musuem.  Could this really be live, I wondered?  And yes, it was.  Five screens showing real time train movements along the lines from north of Doncaster to Northallerton in Yorkshire.  I spent hours looking over the displays and learning how everything worked.  It was a real treat for a signalling enthusiast.  Many lunchbreaks I spent there, after eating my lunch at the rather nice cafe (at which I receive a discount of 36.25% for being a member of the museum’s Friends).  After a while I had picked up enough information, from watching the displays and from talking to more knowledgable visitors, to be able to explain the display to other visitors, and I would also give short talks to groups of schoolchildren as they visited the museum.

There were problems, however.  The analogue monitors were subject to disturbance from the electrical interference generated by powerful electric locomotives as they drew power from the overhead lines.  This would scramble the displays for a minute or so as trains left the station travelling north towards Newcastle.  Over time the displays themselves became tired and began to fail, and it proved too difficult for the museum to arrange for them to be repaired.  Such systems are built by disparate consortia and put into museums as a result of goodwill and negotiation.  As people move on and firms are taken over or close down, the network of contacts which installed the displays can disperse.  First, the departures board stopped working, and then one monitor after another failed and was switched off.  I recall the day when I went to the museum to see a notice declaring that the display was to be removed; I was very sad.  This became one reason why I no longer regularly visited the museum.

Earlier this week however I visited once again to have lunch, and went up to the gallery to see what was going on in the workshops.  Imagine my surprise and joy to see that the live display had been modernised and re-presented, with five new flat-screen displays offering a much improved view of ECML operations.  I was thrilled.  The NRM had pulled a rabbit out of the hat.  My future visits to the NRM will be much happier ones.  Thanks, NRM!

NRM IECC display - overview.

NRM IECC Display - North of Doncaster.

Humphrey Littleton, before he died, used to host a comedy programme on Radio 4 in the UK called “I’m Sorry, I Haven’t a Clue“.  After his death, the BBC put up several extracts from the show on their site, one of which just makes me laugh and laugh.  The programme often featured audience feedback from a Mrs. Trellis, of North Wales, as in this case, the Mornington Crescent Audience Response Survey.  I’ve seen several transcriptions on the web, but none are quite right, so here’s my own:

“We asked 20,000 listeners ‘How would you rate your level of Mornington Crescent satisfaction? Excellent, good, or merely well above average?’  and the reply we got back, …,  came from a Mrs. Trellis of North Wales, who I see has ticked the box marked ‘Neither Good nor Bad,’ and also the boxes marked ‘Poor,’ ‘Very Poor,’ ‘Really Extremely Poor,’ ‘Words Begin to Escape Me as to Quite How Poor,’ and ‘Buttock-clenchingly Piss-Poor’.  In fact, Mrs. Trellis sent us back the wrong form, and if there’s anyone listening at Virgin Rail wondering where it got to, …”

In England, the extended family has become less extended than it used to be.  Grandparents often get shoved into old peoples’ homes and children and young people choose to spend more time online than talking to granny.  When I was young my grandparents were too far away to see often, but I had a godmother with whom I had to have tea once a week after school.  I can’t really remember whether I initially wanted to go or not, but I was soon convinced by the wonderful selection of biscuits and cake and sweet drinks which she set out.  She had a cupboard of toys and I could go and choose.  As I got older, we played card games.  She was a very wise lady, reserved, totally calm.  I can’t remember any single piece of wisdom I got from her, but I remember mostly the attention she paid to me: the non-judging, calm interest, and the quiet love behind it.  I think a child really needs a mentor, a person outside their immediate family whom they can trust and can talk to about issues which they can’t resolve with their parents.  This need doesn’t go away when they reach teenager-hood, and maybe it gets more important then.  (I was cast loose by my parents when I was 16, as my mother died, but an exciting new life took over, with great new relationships to support me.)

The middle teenage years and the time up until one goes into full-time employment seem to me the most exciting and turbulent time of life emotionally, and one to be lived fully, drunk deeply.  The ups and downs of teenagerhood can seem extreme.

I would like to understand better how other people were cared for during their growing years.  Does a supportive adult outside the immediate family play a role in most people’s growing-up?  How has that changed over the last few decades?  The Internet might suck our children’s attention into their computer screens, but it doesn’t change their emotional needs.  So where do today’s teenagers get the emotional support they need and the wisdom that they will need?  Can the Internet have a positive role to play here, as well as the negative tendancy to diminish social contact with older people?

I have always wanted to be a godparent, and it’s been one of the disappointments of life that no-one has ever asked me to take that role.  Godparents are of course a mixed bag.  I’ve had three, only one of whom I can really even remember.  My children have 10 between them.  We chose them with as much care as we could, but only two or three of them have been any good.  It’s obviously not an easy thing to get right, nor an easy role to fulfil.

In addition to the normal banter of our social-networking friendships, I have been talking to some of my younger social networking contacts about issues they have in their lives.  I didn’t set out looking for mentoring-type relationships at all, and in fact I generally steer clear of younger contacts so that I can behave badly online without corrupting children.  However a few carefully-chosen such contacts have really added a special element to social networking for me.  It’s a far cry from godparenting with the commitments which that implies, but it’s not unrelated.  It’s almost tempting to think of setting up a service to put wise old folk in touch with needy teenagers; for about a second.  I think such contacts are much more personal (spiritual) than would be best served by an on-line matchmaking service.  Vouching for the wizened wisearses would be impossibly dicey, with reputation scores being impracticable, and all sorts of undesirable results possible.  However, I do think that social network sites can provide places where such contacts can be made, slowly and carefully.

The flip side of all this is that one has to be careful not to end up letting the activity of supporting others drown out the support one needs oneself.  I use social networking for amusement and to let out my own feelings, and gain a supportive buzz from my online friends.  Other people have told me that sometimes this can become a real burden.  Just as in the rest of life, a healthy balance is needed.

It does seem that demand outstrips supply in this market! I wonder if this will change over the next decades.  There are lots of wise old folk out there who are also lonely.  Perhaps as the population ages, older people will become sufficiently computer literate to get connected with younger folk looking for advice and support.  This is an outcome devoutly to be wished.

Down the steps into the river, originally uploaded by lemon.grass.

I spent the day in Annecy. It deserves a blog entry of its own, but for now here’s the nicest photo I managed to take.

-run!, originally uploaded by claypanpete.

Grumba posted a link to claypanpete’s set of flood photos on Plurk, and this one caught my attention. (c) Copyright claypanpete / Peter Carroll.

My blog has been getting spam comments. I am a new, innocent blogger, and not familiar with the woes and ways of blog spam, but I have installed and activated the Akismet plugin, and am waiting with some hope to see if the spam comments are caught and dealt with automatically. I do hope so. It spoils the fun and excitement of getting a Wordpress email if instead of telling me that someone has read and appreciated my blog, it’s just another spam comment.