Saxophones and Photographs

I have two reasons for the recent lack of blog action, and I mention them because they're quite interesting (though I feel that neither will counteract the suspicion that if one takes four months off from work then one has time to write blog posts pretty frequently):

• I was preparing for my saxophone grade three jazz exam
• I've become addicted to Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/alistairrobinson/)

Last time I mentioned the sax exam in these pages, I had just committed to do it. I said at the time that I had opted to play All Blues, Autumn Leaves and Mopti, but I decided not long after to forget about Autumn Leaves and play Lady Be Good instead. It was a good mixture of styles. Starting off with the understated, yet relentless and bluesy, Miles tune; then into the lyrical, cutesy quirkiness of Gershwin; and rounding it all off with the big, ballsy expressive Don Cherry number (in which I think I was sounding like I was playing tenor rather than alto, and in my head I think I heard it played by a tenor man like Pharoah Sanders).

Well the exam has been and gone and I got the result earlier this week: 139 out of 150, which is classed as a distinction. I was certainly hoping for a distinction, but I reckoned I was right on the borderline at 130, and was prepared to settle for a merit. So I was pleasantly surprised. I think I'll jump to grade five next, if I decide to continue down this route. Unfortunately the jazz grades stop at five with the ABRSM, while their traditional, "classical" grades go up to eight. Trinity Guildhall's jazz grades go up eight, and they offer the option of performing a piece that you've composed yourself, so that might be the way to go.

Or I could just stick with the ABRSM and go classical. Well, just so long as I don't have to play Flight of the Bumblebee.




The thought of going down the traditional route leads me to my latest endeavour in cultivating my musical taste-buds. I'm reading Musicophilia by celebrity neurologist Oliver Sacks, and I recently read Anthony Storr's Music and the Mind. It's clear that both of them are quite musically accomplished, and they write with authority on the music of Haydn, Chopin, Beethoven and so on. For them, the world of music is dominated by the pre-1900 stuff, and I've become eager to have another try at appreciating it. I love literature and art right through from the Renaissance, so why can't I get on with the great music of those times?

So I've been listening to Beethoven's sixth symphony and one of JS Bach's violin concertos. Yes, I like them (the second movement of the violin concerto gets me pretty ecstatic), but I do tend to feel there's something missing, at least for my own taste. Sacks confesses that, although he plays Chopin and understands music deeply, he finds the complex rhythms and syncopations of jazz and Latin music "confusing", because he was brought up with mainly Western classical music. But those rhythms and syncopations are absolutely essential to my world of music, not to mention the jaggedness and dissonance of rock and modern straight music*. Unlike Sacks, I was brought up with Zappa, the Beatles, Hendrix and Ella Fitzgerald.




I'm really a twentieth century boy, and it seems very often that it's only twentieth (and twenty-first) century music that can do it for me. Or at least music outside of the pre-1900 Western straight music tradition. Maybe the rhythms are just too simple for me, the tonality too dull? I can only go so long without a nice meaty chunk of 7/4 time, or a big splash of minor seconds.

Don't get me wrong, I haven't given up: I've got several Haydn symphonies to get through.

I've discovered the delights of Flickr, and spend my days refreshing my Flickr page to see if I've got any more comments on my photos. I'm desperate and pathetic: it must be a true addiction. A few of my pictures are littered over this post. Go see more at my Flickr photos and let me know if you want to use any, or buy framed prints (for which I'll be setting up a new website, coming soon!)





*Straight music: music that comes out of the continuous tradition of musical education and training in Europe and the Americas, centred around prestigious music schools and university music departments and grounded in a study of classics like Bach and Mozart, and in a study of counterpoint, classical harmony, cadences and so on, and which is written mainly for orchestras or ensembles of the traditional acoustic orchestral instruments.

Some call post-1900 straight music "modern classical" but that doesn't really work, because "classical" is really a musico-historical term; and the alternative "serious music" suggests that jazz, for instance, is frivolous. I've been using "modern orchestral", but in this era more than others composers are writing for smaller ensembles than orchestras and more unconventional instrumentations than are usually found in orchestras, so "orchestral" can't be quite right.

So I've opted for "straight music," although it, too, is hardly objective and accurate, revealing as it does the prejudice of the jazz world that came up with the term - some of which, however, is probably justified.

Architectonics and Geotectonics, Connections and Coincidences, Part 1: Basil Spence

When I rest my skull on my pillow tonight I'm fairly certain that the organ inside it will have been significantly rewired. Whether physically or only metaphorically I'm not sure, but let's just say that today was one of those days that really alter your brain. As I write, jammed neural trunk roads are being bypassed with brand new motorways. Mountains of cerebral detritus are being tunneled through by drilling machines powered by intuition. Stagnant lagoons of miasmic notions are being bridged by elegant spans of perspicacity.

Last year I wrote about geology and architecture in art, after visiting GoMA. Today I visited the two galleries of modern art in Edinburgh and found lots of stuff on those themes, and I came out feeling like I was making connections, and that this potentially "fruitful preoccupation", as I called it, was getting stronger.

There's a lot to get through, so I'm spreading it over two posts. First of all...

One hundred years after his birth, there is an exhibition on the architecture of Sir Basil Spence at the Dean Gallery, called Back to the Future. Also at the same gallery there is a parallel, very small, exhibition called Collage City, about architecture in art. And across the road at the Gallery of Modern Art there is an exhibition of paintings by Carol Rhodes.




Spence's most famous buidings are probably Coventry Cathedral, Glasgow Airport, the University of Sussex and the now-demolished Hutchesontown "C" in the Gorbals. Edinburgh folk will know the Edinburgh University library on George Square and John Lewis on Leith Street (I know it's part of the St James Centre but I don't think it should be tarred with the same brush - it's an open, attractive facade, which alleviates the rest of the centre's bunker-like ugliness.)

The exhibition makes it impressively clear that he was also a masterful artist. The drawings and paintings, most of which are actual design documents, are beautiful. I had imagined him as another one of those austere and delusional social-planner-architects of the modernist era, but I discovered that he was more of an artist-architect, almost a craftsman of his age. He was very concerned with the traditions of craftsmanship and materials, not at all dismissive of everything that went before. This is partly the influence of Arts and Crafts architect Edwin Lutyens, whose practice Spence worked for early in his career.



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But there isn't much Arts and Crafts in this building. It's Scottish Widows in Dalkeith Road, Edinburgh. The shape is not only functional: situated below the volcanic outcrops of Salisbury Crags and Arthur's Seat, Spence designed it with this aerial view in mind; and the interlocking hexagons recall the columns of basalt that sometimes form when lava cools, so the building connects with its local geology. Every time I've been on Arthur's Seat I've seen it, and every time I've wondered what it was...every time having forgotten to pursue the question after coming back down.




He designed another building for Scottish Widows in Edinburgh, in St Andrew Square. It's less interesting to look at from the outside, but it has an interior of modernist luxury, still visible in its staircases and meeting rooms. I know this because I worked there a few years ago. It had long ceased to be the offices of Scottish Widows, and I was working for a small web development company that was renting a couple of the rooms. I liked the building and I could tell that it was something special, in the style of modernism that I liked, but I hadn't imagined that it was designed by Basil Spence.

(And talking of connections and coincidences, my good lady Laura works for Scottish Widows Investment Partnership.)

The exhibition is excellent. It presents his work with original sketches and technical drawings (plans, elevations, axonometric views and so on), balsa-wood models, contemporary news reports and memorabilia, several films, many photographs, and blocks of the various materials used in the construction of the buildings.

It divides up his work into four rooms:

Studio 1: Early Career
Studio 2: Exhibitions; Education; Country Houses
Studio 3: Housing; Public and Cermonial
Studio 4: Coventry Cathedral


One of the successes of his early his early career was the Southern Motors petrol station of 1933, which still stands in Causewayside, here in Edinburgh. It evokes the glamour of the thirties, and its clean bright surfaces bring a light cheeriness to this dark street of dour tenements. It's now a wine shop.




Also in Studio 1 there are a number of designs that were never built. He entered in to competitions while he was still at Edinburgh College of Art. Among them is a design for an open-air theatre on Calton Hill, whose seats I would have been standing amongst when I took this picture. I imagine the wind would have been a problem.


Studio 2 covers the University of Sussex, whose meeting house is shown above; his work for the Festival of Britain in 1951, which was centred on London's South Bank; the British Pavilion at Expo '67 in Montreal; and Gribloch, a big house near Stirling. The drawings and photographs of the pavilions at the Festival of Britain are awe-inspiring, and I can well understand why those who visited as children can remember it so vividly to this day.




Among the country houses he designed were this holiday home for himself and his family - Spence House in Beaulieu, Hampshire, built in 1958, using concrete and red cedar.




Studio 3 includes his development in the Gorbals, Hutchesontown C, and a number of other social housing projects. You can see some of his housing towards the foot of the Royal Mile; in Newhaven, near Leith; and in East Claremont Street. Also covered are Mortonhall Crematorium, in the south of Edinburgh, and the spectacular British Embassy in Rome, shown above (you can view a photo gallery at the Embassy's website.)




And this is the New Zealand parliament extension in Wellington, known as the Beehive, which he designed in the late sixties and was built over the following few years, but which wasn't opened until after his death in 1976.

I was also struck by the balsa-wood model of a design for the Bahrain National Cultural Centre. If it had been built it would have been stunning, combining Arabic and modernist geometries in a vast palace of soft earthy colours.




And there's a connection with my last blog post: Trawsfynydd nuclear power station. It's represented in the exhibition by a striking drawing in colour, which really illustrates the modernist vision of how the new architecture could complement the natural landscape. This is an interesting vision, which I share to some extent. For example, in my opinion the Victorian castles of Scotland no more fit in with the landscape than the twentieth century hydro-electric plants, but we've been brought up with an idyllic rural vision that can be hard to shake off. Seen afresh, the clean lines of modern architecture respond more carefully to the landscape, because very often they simply have to, and with reinforced concrete they can. A good example is shown above (it's actually Wales, but you get the picture.)

Studio 4 is dedicated to his most famous achievement: Coventry Cathedral, designed in the fifties and consecrated in 1962, to replace the one that was destroyed by bombing in the Second World War. It has pride of place in the exhibition as the culmination of his work, and that's probably how he saw it himself: it was his life's ambition to design a cathedral. He decided to leave the bombed ruin standing, and actually connected it physically to the new building. By doing this he wanted to embody the triumph of the Resurrection that followed the ultimate sacrifice. With this ostensibly religious motivation he exemplifies the post-war mood of optimism and confidence.




You may have noticed that I haven't said much about the Gorbals. Well I'm not avoiding the subject - I just thought that I would treat it separately from his other work. Partly because of this work, there are questions over Spence's legacy, and over the legacy of twentieth century modern architecture as a whole, and that's one of the reasons I'm writing this blog post.

The Queen Elizabeth tower blocks, or Hutchesontown C, have helped to give modern architecture a bad name. For many, they stand for the delusions of the social planners who thought they could force people to live differently. For many, they incriminate modernism and its architects. And for many, Basil Spence and others were partly responsible for making thousands of people's lives miserable.

Among Spence's buildings, Hutchesontown C is a special case. It is one of only a very few of his designs that have been demolished, and certainly the biggest development to suffer that fate. The artist Toby Paterson, who I've mentioned before in this blog and who I'll probably mention again in the follow-up post to follow this one, speaks about the developement in a podcast on basilspence.org.uk. He suggests that Glasgow City Council's decision to demolish these particular tower blocks was PR - an iconoclastic act to appease those who were clamouring for regeneration and housing improvements. He points out that these buildings were not your grim run-of-the-mill Glasgow tower blocks - as I think you can see from the picture above - and shouldn't have been associated with that kind of architecture. Basil Spence and his buildings, with their prominence, made easy targets. The decision signalled the council's abandonment of the ideals that motivated Spence in the first place.

What were those ideals? Well, let's remember that the Gorbals was a horrendous overcrowded slum. He wanted to provide its residents with new, healthy, more comfortable lives.

I designed the flats to make life easier for mothers and housewives. I planned the hanging gardens so that mothers could put their children and their washing out in the fresh air without going all the way to the ground. (1)

The trouble was, while Spence wanted to improve people's lives, local authorities up and down the land increasingly began to treat council tenants with contempt, using housing schemes to create ghettos. The modernist style was convenient for them because it was easy to execute it badly and cheaply:

Modern architecture very easily became a thin veneer over the utilitarian box or the developer’s financial calculations. (2)

After a few years, councils began to leave buildings to rot. When social disintegration, unemployment and hard drugs arrived in the seventies and eighties, buildings like this came to represent all that was miserable, dangerous, deprived and delapidated. In those circumstances, Spence's housing was emphatically not a solution. But neither was it the cause of the strife.

But there is a wider issue: whether the whole modernist project was flawed. Spence once said:

The object is to build for human beings in the same way that a tailor builds a suit of clothes round a certain body. (3)

These days we doubt that this can be done, even in principle. It's a milder, more British version of Le Corbusier's vision of a house as a "machine for living in," which in the end seemed to become a vision of man as a machine made for living in one of their perfect buildings.

Although I lived in two different council estates, I never lived in a tower block, and when I was growing up in the eighties, many of them were as forbidding and ugly to me as they were to anyone else. But while most of them are ugly - because of all those nasty little corrupt or cheapskate councils and their incompetent architects and lazy contractors - there are many that deserve better appreciation. In fact, it's easy to prove that tower blocks are not inherently bad, and that they can escape all those bad associations. Get a good modernist tower block, give it a smart foyer and a concierge in a smart uniform and a smart hat, build a gym on the top floor, install lifts that work - then maintain them, and keep the place clean. Lo and Behold: luxury executive apartments! This is happening in various British cities, but this is exactly what should have been done years ago for all those council tenants.

I do find these buildings exciting to look at. They just look so much more interesting than the bland houses of today. But it might be true that, as Matt Weaver wrote in the Guardian last year, "as sculpture, they had a rugged handsomeness, but as a place to live they were nasty and brutish." However, Spence symbolizes something that is now lost: it's hard to believe it now, but there was a time in this country when top architects would apply the latest technology and thinking in the service of society, to help build a better one. Today, serious or cutting-edge architecture seems far more remote, applied to the construction of functionless icons like the Gateshead Arena, Urbis in Manchester, the London Eye, and any number of over-designed footbridges up-and-down the country; or else to the swollen erections of high finance, like 30 St Mary Axe in London, otherwise known as the Gherkin. We need more Basil Spences.

The last word should go to some people who lived in the Queen Elizabeth tower blocks:

I live in Oban now and in a middle class home, but I still reminisce about the times we had in the corridors going along on my bike. It did not matter if it was wet or not, you had somewhere safe to play. These flats should not have been demolished. I often think it's disgusting that they went up and down in my life span and I am only forty three. It was one of the city's most beautiful landmarks, and if no one else does, I miss them when I visit Glasgow. (4)

I now live in a middle class home myself and can honestly say that it did me no harm at all growing up in a tower block, especially one that was so modern and well equipped. In the 1970's there was a great community spirit, one which does not exist today in middle class communities, because everyone is so self sufficient. That to me is a great loss to humanity. I have a lot of fond memories of my childhood — my friends and neighbours were kind lovely people, and block caretakers like Mr Mellon and Jimmy Robertson who kept the place spick and span and knew every single tenant were pillars of our community. The buildings had great long corridors that children could play along for hours and hours and we never felt scared or were aware of danger the way children are today. The truth of the matter is that the building design was not the enemy, it was left to decay by local authorities who did not know what maintenance was, and by the local authorities policy on letting. (4)

For more information, basilspence.org.uk is truly excellent, with a wealth of information on individual buildings, and numerous videos and podcasts. Also, there's a picture presentation at the BBC website.

Or go to the exhibition. It's free!

Next time, I'll be looking at Toby Paterson's response to modernism and to Basil Spence in particular, and I'll be looking at other work involving architecture, landscape and geology, including stuff about Carol Rhodes, Glen Onwin, Ilana Halperin and William Gear.

(1) Sir Basil Spence Archive Project http://www.basilspence.org.uk
(2) Curtis, W. (1986) Le Corbusier: ideas and forms, Oxford: Phaidon Press, quoted in The revival of high-rise living in the UK and issues of cost and revenue in relation to height, Master Thesis in European Property Development and Planning, University College London, September 2005, by Jan Kunze http://eprints.ucl.ac.uk/2647/1/2647.pdf
(3) Sir Basil Spence Archive Project http://www.basilspence.org.uk
(4) The Gorbals Blocks Debate http://thejoyofconcrete.org/gorb/gorbalsdebate.htm

Clean Energy 2: The Comeback of Nuclear Power in the UK

"Nuclear power? To most people, it’s witchcraft" (Chris Patten)

To describe nuclear power as clean might seem perverse, given that some of the waste produced is so dangerous that no materials can survive being used to contain it, and that it remains dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years.

But last week the government finally said yes to the construction of up to ten nuclear power stations, at least some of which might be up-and-running by 2020. They've put off the decision for a long time. New Labour, motivated for so long by the desire to be liked, refused to face the impending energy crisis. Now that the closure of many of our existing nuclear power stations is fast approaching (several over the next twenty years), and now that they have the fortifying experience of not being liked, they've bitten the bullet.

Generally, my main concern is for progress, for economic development, which I believe is the basis for a society of free and equal people, living fulfilling lives. A wealthy, technologically advanced country like Britain needs base load power stations, ones that provide a constant flow of power. It looks like renewables cannot provide much of this, so the answer must be coal, oil and nuclear. Given the need to reduce CO2 emissions, this means we need to go for nuclear or clean coal - or both. From this perspective, nuclear power is very important, because clean coal is still in its infancy.

Nuclear can be considered clean because it does not pollute the environment. Although the high-level waste is extremely dangerous, in practise it doesn't actually harm people or the environment, if stored correctly. And there isn't much of it. Ten new nuclear power stations with a lifetime of sixty years would produce 40,900 cubic metres of this waste, which is half the volume of the Albert Hall. (1) The projects for the waste's short-term and long-term containment look good: Managing our Radioactive waste Safely (Committee on Radioactive Waste Management, PDF)

Nuclear is now one of the safest, cleanest ways we have of producing energy, but it got a bad name for itself in the eighties and nineties. This is partly owing to scientific ignorance and a mis-perception of risk, but the nastiness of the nuclear industry couldn't have helped either. "The nuclear industry, for most of its life, has been, to put it at its mildest, economical with the truth" (2)

While I'm broadly supportive of the new plans, I can sympathise with those who aren't and who know how despicable the industry has been in the past. It's been run by a secretive cabal of shamans and priests, jealously guarding their power against outsiders. I don't know how much it has changed, but can we afford to hold things up while they get their act together? We certainly need a completely open, honest and unapologetic nuclear industry, not one that will reinforce the perception of witchcraft. But we also need to get started on the new stations now.

My fondest childhood memories are of living in the little village of Fairlie, a mile or two south of Largs, on the North Ayrhsire coast. In this part of Ayrshire the towns cling to a narrow stretch of land between the sea and a big lump of uninhabitable high moorland, now called Clyde Muirshiel Regional Park, extending from Greenock in the north to West Kilbride in the south, and inland to Lochwinnoch and Kilmacolm. And with Cumbrae, Arran and Bute enclosing the Firth of Clyde, this stretch of coastline has a sheltered, cosy feel to it. It's dramatic and picturesque, but not overwhelming (I've only just realized that I have this knowledge, or appreciation, after having been away for a long time.)


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Hunterston nuclear power station faces across the bay, from underneath the cliffs at Portencross, to Fairlie and Cumbrae, and it was part of my childhood world, along with the huge ore terminal. The memory of seeing Hunterston "A" - the old Magnox reactor, now being decommissioned - illuminated at night, is strong. I visited it once (although it was probably Hunterston "B", the newer but less attractive station just next-door), as part of my physics class, and I was struck by how empty it was. Self-centred cynical adolescents we may have been, but even we were awed by the caverns of concrete and steel, and the cathedral-like proportions, and just the thought of that massive hidden power was enough to convince us that we could feel it under our feet and buzzing in the air.

A few dozen metres out to sea are the intake and outlet stations for the cooling system. I remember being struck by the sight of the big bubbling patch where the warmed water was returned to the sea. You can see both the intake and outlet very clearly on the satellite image. The white blob is the latter.

Now that I'm in Edinburgh, my local nuclear power station is Torness, on the coast of East Lothian. You get a good view of it from the East Coast Main Line railway. A couple of years ago, one of its walls became a projector screen for Europe's biggest art installation, Lumin de Lumine by Ken McMullen. See a picture of it here on this particle physics website.

(1) The Future of Nuclear Power, DTI, May 2007
(2) Reporting the Nuclear Industry: Sorcery versus Common Sense, The Uranium Institute

Government go-ahead: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7179579.stm

Clean Energy 1: A Milestone in The Glendoe Hydro-electric Scheme

On January 7th the 200-metre-long tunnel boring machine called Eliza Jane broke through the side of a mountain in Scotland after sixteen months of grinding. The resulting five mile tunnel will take water from a reservoir up on the Monadhliath plateau down to Loch Ness, via an underground cavern housing a hydro-electric power station. It's the biggest civil engineering project in Scotland, and the first major hydro scheme in Britain since the fifties I think. As such, it's tremendously exciting: as I've mentioned before, hydro power sets me all a-trembling with fascination and a smidgin of dread. So indulge me.

The water head - the vertical distance from the turbine to the intake at the reservoir, is 600 metres, the highest in Britain. That's just as well, because there aren't any big rivers up there, and to get a half-decent flow they're having to gather together a number of burns.



http://www.topomatika.hr/Applications/turbine-en.htm

The power station will use a Pelton turbine. The American Lester Allan Pelton invented it in about 1870, and it's still going strong. It's pretty much the most efficient way of getting the energy out of a jet of water. It works by getting energy from the force of a high-speed jet, not from the pressure of the head of water. And with a high head of 600 meteres you can get a pretty fast flow going.

We're not about to run out of rain any time soon - any more than we're about to run out of wind - so it's as sustainable as you can get. Some members of the walking community were opposed to it, at least in the beginning, but it's generally viewed favourably by environmentalists and it's popular with the locals. (As it is, the area isn't much frequented by walkers anyway, and it's primarily been only a deer and grouse hunting area for a long time.) It'll have a capacity of 100 megawatts, which is a huge contribution to the country's energy - the equivalent of 50 wind turbines.

Scottish & Southern Energy seem to have been very careful not to disturb any important or sensitive species of wildlife. Concerning the water vole, they even went as far as to establish that the dam and reservoir will destroy only a few disused burrows. Whether the presence of a single water vole at the bottom of the valley would have stalled the project, I'm not sure.




If you can't get enough of all this water engineering, the scheme featured in a radio program by Adam Hart-Davis a couple of years ago, when construction was just beginning. You can still listen to it here. Also, have a look at my other posts, on the Great Man-made River Project and the Loch Sloy Power Station.

BBC report
Edinburgh Evening News report
Glendoe scheme official site

Across The Rumbling Bridge: A Walk at The Hermitage, Dunkeld

I drew this yesterday, from a photograph I took a couple of Sundays ago when we were walking Oscar, our new canine honorary nephew - but more of him later. The picture shows Ossian's Hall, viewed from one side of the Rumbling Bridge, which spans the River Braan in a woodland estate called the Hermitage, near Dunkeld in Perthshire. Our friend Nicky, Oscar's owner, was with us, and she had been before. But I'd never heard of it.




The building, a folly built for the Duke of Atholl in the eighteenth century, has a semicircular balcony - unseen in the drawing - which overlooks, and in fact overhangs, an awesome roaring tumult of water.




A great waterfall feeds a stubbornly narrow corridor of rock that gorges up all the water and spews it through the high arch of the bridge into a churning pool downstream. A few miles further down, it flows into the Tay. It's a spectacular little spate river, very popular with those white-water kayaking maniacs. One of its many cataracts has the unenticing name of Coffin Falls - unenticing, that is, unless you're one of those white-water kayaking maniacs.




The entrance to the gorge, seen here looking upstream from the bridge.




But there's more. There's also a hermit's cave, designed, I suppose, as a quaint grotto for the beguilement of the idle aristos; a small totem pole carved by the Squamish Nation of British Columbia, featuring an eagle, and made from one of the estate's Douglas Firs; and Britain's tallest tree (itself a Douglas Fir).




Now I'll return to the subject of Oscar. Oscar is Nicky's new dog, a year-old cocker spaniel. Laura, who's been missing the company of dogs these past few years, has volunteered her - and my - services as occasional dog-sitters and dog-walkers.

As it turns out, Oscar is an exemplary hound and we're very happy to help. But as I said somewhere else recently, one minute you're just sauntering along through life, and then BANG! - you're uncle to a spaniel.




If you want to go, check out this very good online guide