A survey by Reader’s Digest has revealed so-called shocking statistics about the British public’s lack of knowledge of classical music. Now, noone is disputing that the figures look bad (75% did not know that Elgar wrote ‘Pomp and Circumstance’, and 27% did not know he was a composer), but are they actually surprising? Classical music still finds it hard to shake off the image that it is difficult and elitist, but a lot of music education doesn’t do much to help dispel this. Further, does not knowing Elgar’s name prevent an appreciation of Pomp and Circumstance? Of course not. Sixty-one per cent of respondents said they liked classical music, so not knowing names is clearly not putting people off. Not knowing who Lady Gaga is wouldn’t stop someone from dancing along, and this feels uncomfortably like a chance for those who are classical music aficionados to feel smug – which is really not going to help its image. It’s all very well to climb aboard one’s high horse and look down at those who think that Bocconcini is a composer (when, obviously, Boccooncini is an Italian cheese ball), but I didn’t know that, and I both listen to classical music and have Music A-level. A question like that is just setting people up to look foolish. That aside, the fact that one third of respondents to the survey never listened to classical music is the more pertinent figure – after all, it’s hardly gobsmacking that people have little specialist knowledge of a something they never listen to.
Return to AP Towers after family hols come to a sad end (sad that they ended - nothing bad happened, apart from being fined by an officious Austrian). While working at AP is blissful, obviously, walking in the Slovenian Alps and then lying by a pool in Istria was not bad either.
Week one, I read The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver - what a disappointment. She has been on one writing course too many. I then re-read The Rotters Club (one of my favourites) because I experienced Book Envy with Spouse chuckling to himself while I ploughed on with La Kingsolver. Also read The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters. Genius. Brilliantly crafted and beautifully observed.
So what has happened in my absence? Isla (designer) has gone off somewhere hot; Katie (web) has used up most of her holiday entitlement already attending gazillions of festivals, so has not been away; Nosheen and El (editorial supremos) have taken advantage of the Absence of A Magazine to forward plan through the autumn; and Jo and Tricia are covering for Paul (advertising) who got married on Saturday and has taken his lovely lady wife to Cyprus for a couple of weeks.
Everyone is fine. Is this the mark of good management, or am I surplus to requirement..?
We’ve been having an interesting debate on the @ArtsPro Twitter account today, after the lovely Katie asked a question about whether it’s OK to Tweet at the theatre. Personally, I’m all for sharing experiences and opinions, but not during the show. No offence to anyone, but your opinion is not so important that it can’t wait until the interval/end of the show. By all means tweet about plays, and by all means tweet from inside theatre buildings, but during the actual play, phones off. And that includes iPhones, iPads, blackberries etc, too.
It’s not the noise I object to (although very few phones are silent), it’s the light. Back-lit screens are incredibly distracting when you’re sitting in the dark. So, by all means tell your followers if Jamie Parker was fabulous as Prince Hal at the Globe (he was) or if Alan Bennett’s ‘The Habit of Art’ left you cold (it did). But wait until a suitable break. Please.
But, lots of people disagree, including this article, which I commented on when it first appeared (I’m @EllieFace, and I’m a curmudgeon). I reckon designated ‘tweet seats’ would be OK, so long as they were at the back of the stalls, where the audience can’t see. I don’t know how distracting it would be for the actors. What do you think?
When Nosheen came for interview for the Editor’s job, she was introduced to me and said “Ah! You’re the girl who reads everything”. Now, this has always been true (I did an English degree, after all), but is more accurate since I started writing News from the Nationals once a fortnight. This basically means that I get paid to read the papers. Ace. It also means that I am a) annoying – any time anyone says “did you see…?” the answer is yes, and b) a dinner party bore – I can talk for hours about the minutiae of the arts.
However, my social problems aside, it can sometimes all be a bit much: when you shift through the sheer volume of stuff that I do every fortnight, it can sometimes be hard to see the wood for the trees. I have to have an opinion about something once a fortnight. Easy, I hear you cry. Well, yes, in some ways. I have opinions about all sorts of things, every day. What the punishment should be for taxi drivers who try to kill me on my bike ride to work, for example. Why Michael Gove is the worst thing to happen to education in a very long time. How AS Byatt can write such glorious short stories and such horrifically turgid novels. But, and this is the catch, while I could ramble on any of these topics for 200 words, no problem, none of them is relevant to our lovely readers, or widely discussed in the press.
So, I tend to drift towards the stories that have been covered the most widely, loudly, interestingly or controversially in the papers and the blogs. This has its own potential problems though: do I have anything interesting to add to the debate? And how coloured has my opinion been by what I’ve read? It’s one thing to read several different papers to try and get a balanced view of the facts, but once columnists and bloggers throw their hats into the ring, it often gets harder to make up your mind.
Take this week’s NFTN, for example. I ended up writing about BP’s continuing sponsorship of the Tate, the BP Portrait Award and the Royal Opera House. Now, this has been a contentious subject, and widely covered by the media. It took me quite a long time to decide what I thought, and longer to condense it into 200 words (and I cheated – it’s more than 200 words, which you can do online!) that people might actually want to read. I’m not convinced that it moved the debate on, but hopefully it gave people all the information they need to make up their own mind.
This is Cambridge, where AP lives. Pretty, isn’t it?
Press day, surprisingly perhaps, is generally not the editorial team’s busiest day – that honour falls on a Tuesday the day before. That’s when all the news should be written, all the copy has been edited (by me), second edited (by Nosheen), read (by Pam), proofed (by Vicki and Brian), laid out on the page (by Isla)… Phew. Then we all have a nice lie down, and actual press day is usually rather more sedate. Sure, there are last minute cuts/tweaks to make, occasional breaking news stories that have to be written and slotted in, and Paul always does his best to ruin my beautiful flat-plans by selling ads (chuh!). But, on the whole, press day is harder on Isla than anyone else – she has to juggle proofs covered in my indecipherable scrawl as well as getting proofs of ads back to advertisers for their sign off.
My press day mainly involves recovering from a mammoth writing day on Tuesday (news, newsreel and News from the Nationals) and then collating sets of proofing corrections so that Isla receives one set of proofs with everyone’s input on. We try and get all the copy (that’s features, comment, observations etc written by contributors) ready the week before, but missed deadlines, holiday, sick days, bank holidays and conferences all conspire against us to mean that this isn’t always the case.
But now it’s Thursday, which means it’s time to dive headfirst into copy for the next issue…