The Revised Plan

 Perhaps we can do without Sounds of the 60's here after all. I'm halfway through Move Over Darling and I'll park it there. It got about as far as most of my bright ideas get and will still be there, with the short stories, the Thom Gunn book, the last vainglorious attempt to start a novel and other fragments, to be taken up on some furure occasion which might never arrive.

One project at a time is the best plan and I have been making gradual progress but progress nonetheless with the play and that might get finished. The word count on the document is at 6000 but that's not all dialogue. I've been looking up how long plays are, knowing that The Comedy of Errors is Shakespeare's shortest- that's 22 thousand words- but finding some encouragement in 130 words per minute which means I'm over the half hour already and only in Act, by which I mean Scene, 3. So I will persevere with that. It is enjoyable to do once one tries and it makes me laugh (at my jokes or recycled other ones) if it's never going to make anybody else do so.

As well as there being any amount of writing and memoir aabout pop music available from writers better qualified to write it I also have my other excuse that one's time is surely better spent reading good books than writing bad ones. Wendy Lesser's Music for Silenced Voices is as good as they come. A couple of years ago I piled such praise on Ian Bostridge's Schubert's Winter Journey that I made it the best book I'd ever read and must one day check again aand see if it really is. 

Music for Silenced Voices doesn't do quite the same thing for the Shostakovich String Quartets. Ian used the Winterreise as a starting point to expand impressively into a wide range of themes whereas Wendy's book is more a biographical account of Shostakovich done via the String Quartet cycle. The ideal situation is to have the Fitzwilliam Quartet playing while one reads but so far it's been rare for the quartet they're playing to coincidence with the one I'm reading about but it's hugely useful and, for a non-musician, very cogent aand sympathetic.

For me, Shostakovich becomes more and more the greatest composer of the C20th. The anxiety, the isolation and despair run through it, even the dance passages are tinged with it but there's a lot more to him than that. The layers or irony, the references smuggled in under the Soviet censor's ignoramus attention and the biographical significance are there in among the purely abstract music that Wendy argues is what the quartets are, much more than the symphonies. And even if he was understandably nervous in his perilous position, he was not the studious introverted academic type that he looked like. He had a great capacity for deep friendship, mourned the loss of several close friends who died too soon and was one for a laugh, joke and dancing, too.

It might have been unnecessarily brave of him to remain in the USSR, unlike Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Rachmanninov who had easier celebrity lives in America, but he stayed with Mother Russia, miraculously tip-toeing the high-wire between dissidence (and dissonance) and the Party. He is a 'colossus' and Wendy's book does him some service.