Without the threats and dangers

Dr. Johnson's C18th prose is an elaborate thing compared to most of what we read now but is in recognizably the same language and is all the more enjoyable for it. The writing we have of Shakespeare is all in the plays and poetry and so of a different order but is comprehensible with a bit of effort. There aren't any extant letters in which he might forsooth and by expeditious warranty take arms against those who estimate him unworthy. Nobody can read Beowulf without learning how to, though. Thus, English, a very recent innovation in the history of language continues to make its way to being something we wouldn't understand and, if you listen to Radio 1Extra, that future might be already here.

How useful, then, to appreciate the much wider perspectives of A History of Writing by Steven Roger Fischer, and how at a crucial moment pictures began to shift into the representation of sounds. We owe that to the Sumerians of circa 3700BC who lived in south, central Iraq. Not much of what they wrote survives into our present day alphabet but on a table that shows the development of letters from Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs to Latin, M is the vestigial remains of wavy water, N of a wiggly snake and O of an eye. Anyone interested in some job security would be well advised to take up the study of cuneiform after,

in 1975, over fifteen thousand cuneiform tablets were discovered at Ebla (Syria) which once comprised the official library that had burnt around the year 2300BC. It will take scholars at least a century to read and assess this enormous wealth of information.

So, a Professorship in Ancient Syrian Cuneiform looks like a job for life.

But I'll have to leave that on page 82 and look forward to returning to it because the library have provided me with Edward Elgar, A Creative Life by Jerrold Northrop Moore. The wireless played the Cello Concerto the other day and I was prompted to find out more than the few bits we all know. Elgar isn't as essential to me like those on my own shelves - Bach, Handel, Mozart, Buxtehude - but 850 pages need to be read by Feb 6. They will be but one needs must crack on.

The first two chapters are quite charming with their mixture of a provincial Victorian childhood complete with austere father and sibling mortality but it mixes in some psychology, too,

verbal and musical abilities are centred in opposite hemispheres of the brain...Words and poems and stories are tied to particular things. But music need not be tied to any defined thing. So music must have a special appeal for a person who is emotionally isolated, the abstraction of music can offer a means of experiencing emotion without the threats and dangers always implicit in defined situations and conflicting characters.

 

Oh, I see. I did make a vaguely similar point about poems being tied to 'meaning' in a seminar about 45 years ago but I didn't reach the same conclusion. Then, I thought it explained why avant-garde music had had seemingly more success than avant-garde poetry which had remained a more minority enterprise. I still don't reach the same conclusion, either, as music is a more social thing than writing and literature (it seems to me) is where the natural outsider is more likely to find their solace. And I can't agree that music is 'without conflicting characters'. Not in Tosca, for a start.

Nonetheless, one doesn't have to agree with everything to find it of interest and I don't think 850 pages, judged on the first 32, will be a hardship. It suggests there might be more detail than one really needs, which can happen when the diligent biographer doesn't want their research to go to waste but we will see. I don't think the few discs in my Elgar section can be expected to accompany the whole book but Natalie Clein's recording of the Cello Concerto with the gentle wash of Salut d'Amour made for some welcome auld acquaintance today.

I don't know where the book will leave Elgar by the end. He's not my favourite British composer and neither is Britten. They've got an impossible job on against Byrd, Tallis and Purcell but we will see. We'll see.