{television} – { feuilleton }

Leaving Home: Orchestral Music in the 20th Century

In which orchestral conductor Simon Rattle explores a century of music in much the same way that Robert Hughes explored a century of art in The Shock of the New. Or almost… It’s unfair to compare this more modest TV series to a landmark which was shot on film and with a budget large enough to allow Hughes to present his art history from locations all around the world.

If you’ve ever felt in need of an intelligent introduction to the challenges of orchestral music then Leaving Home is the ideal guide. The series was broadcast by Channel 4 (UK) in 1996, a time when the channel still was still devoting a considerable portion of its programming to the arts. Simon Rattle was a wise choice as a presenter, being a conductor with a less intimidating demeanour than some, as well as a proselytising nature. His intention here was to dispel the difficulty which many people still feel when faced with atonal compositions (twelve-tone music, aleatory music, serialism) by explaining how these musical forms evolved and why they’re not so difficult at all once you appreciate the reasoning behind them and the context out of which they emerged. Music is a curious medium in this respect. Where other art forms can start to feel distinctly old-fashioned and even thoroughly antiquated once a few decades have elapsed, there’s a lot of European music which is well over a hundred years old yet can still challenge and disturb an audience today if that audience is unprepared. Rattle’s explanations parallel The Shock of the New by dividing a century of artistic evolution into distinct modes or themes. The structure of the series and the music under discussion is as follows:

Programme 1: Dancing on a Volcano
Wagner, Prelude to Tristan and Isolde
Schoenberg, Transfigured Night
Mahler, Symphony no. 7
Strauss, Elektra
Schoenberg, Five Orchestral Pieces, op. 16, nos. 1 and 2
Webern, Five Orchestral Pieces, op. 10, nos. 3, 4 and 5
Berg, Violin Concerto

Programme 2: Rhythm
Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring
Varèse, Ionisation
Mahler, “Abschied” from Das Lied von der Erde
Ligeti, Atmosphères
Reich, Music for Pieces of Wood
Nancarrow, Piano Roll no. 21
Boulez, Rituel in Memoriam Bruno Maderna
Messiaen, Turangalîla Symphony

Programme 3: Colour
Debussy, Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune
Stravinsky, The Firebird
Ravel, Daphnis et Chloé
Debussy, Jeux
Schoenberg, Five Orchestral Pieces, op. 16, no. 3 “Farben”
Boulez, Notations
Messiaen, Et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum
Takemitsu, Dream/Window

Programme 4: Three Journeys through Dark Landscapes
Bartók, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle
Bartók, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta
Bartók, The Miraculous Mandarin
Bartók, Concerto for Orchestra
Shostakovich, Symphony no. 4
Shostakovich, Symphony no. 5
Shostakovich, Symphony no. 14
Lutosławski, Concerto for Orchestra
Lutosławski, Venetian Games
Lutosławski, Symphony no. 3

Programme 5: The American Way
Gershwin, Rhapsody in Blue
Ives, Decoration Day
Carter, A Celebration of Some 100 x 150 Notes
Copland, Appalachian Spring
Weill, “Lonely House” from Street Scene
Bernstein, “Symphonic Dances” from West Side Story
Cage, Sonatas and Interludes
Cage, First Construction in Metal
Feldman, Madame Press Died Last Week at 90
Riley, In C
Adams, Harmonium

Programme 6: After the Wake
Strauss, “Im Abendrot” from Four Last Songs
Schoenberg, A Survivor from Warsaw
Boulez, Le marteau sans maître
Webern, Five Orchestral Pieces, op. 10, no. 4
Stockhausen, Gruppen
Britten, Serenade for tenor, horn and strings
Stravinsky, Agon

Programme 7: Threads
Berio, Laborintus II
Henze, Symphony no. 8
Gubaidulina, Zeitgestalten
Kurtág, Grabstein für Stefan
Birtwistle, Ritual Fragment
Turnage, Drowned Out
Knussen, Flourish with Fireworks

“Leaving home” in Rattle’s explanation is a phrase that refers to music leaving behind the rules and harmonic bases of the previous centuries. It also refers to various forms of exile and social change, departures from earlier orthodoxies. Much of the music explored here was created in years and nations beset by wars and revolutions, and, as Rattle notes, art created under such conditions can’t help but reflect its time. I have the book of the series by Michael Hall which is very good in its own way, filled with a more detailed history and musicology, as well as many photographs and paintings relevant to the compositions. What the book lacks is the music itself, and this is the real strength of the TV series. Rattle spends each programme either sitting at a piano or conducting the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra who play extracts of all the pieces under discussion. Rattle is a proficient pianist which that means in the first couple of programmes he’s able to physically emphasise some of his talking points, in particular those instances when a composer deliberately deviates from expectation. Watching an orchestra perform a composition you’ve just heard described is much more effective than listening to a recording, especially when we reach the 1950s with extracts from a performance of Stockhausen’s Gruppen.

Continue reading “Leaving Home: Orchestral Music in the 20th Century”

Weekend links 848

Exhibition poster, 1970.

• RIP Peter Max, an artist who made the popular manifestations of psychedelic graphics near-synonymous with his own name which was always typeset and prominently displayed with a copyright symbol on his printed creations. Max’s formulation of the artist-as-brand was so extensive he makes those who attempted similar things look like slackers. Even Salvador Dalí didn’t have his own breakfast cereal. Hippy transcendence fused with naked commercialism. More Max: The 1971 Peter Max Astrologicalendar; Riverside Drive, a Max-designed typeface; Max on TV: The Fifth Dimension Special: An Odyssey in the Cosmic Universe of Peter Max (1970); Peter Max book covers, puzzles and more.

• “Film is a very unusual combination of things because it has an incredible financial commitment of spending, yet it has to be free and creative. To be any good, the cinema that I do has to be free and yet there are many constraints on it now and my best films were made in an era of wildness…” The late Jeremy Thomas talking to Nick James in 2014 about his long career in cinema.

• At Nautilus: The Promise and Peril of Toad Smoking, the Everest of Psychedelics. Kristen French talks to Kimon de Greef about his new book, The Ego Trip: Psychedelic Toads, a Trail of Deaths and the Guru Who Peddled Transcendence.

• At Smithsonian Mag: Thomas Waters on six ways that people of the past used magic to protect their homes, from witch bottles to mystical symbols.

• New music: September Nineteen Sixty Nine by Adam Wiltzie / Jóhann Jóhannsson; Now We Can Sing by Max Richter; Norfolk by Richard Sage.

• At CDM: Adam Wiltzie talks to Peter Kirn about his posthumous collaboration with Jóhann Jóhannsson.

• At Public Domain Review: Thomas W. Laqueur on dogs in the paintings of Paolo Veronese.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Spotlight on Leonora Carrington The Hearing Trumpet (1977).

• At the BFI: Kim Newman chooses 10 great sci-fi B-movies.

• Old music: King Crimson on German TV in 1969.

• 1969 (1969) by The Stooges | 1969 (1983) by The Sisters Of Mercy | 1969 (2002) by Boards Of Canada

Weekend links 847

La voix des airs (1931) by René Magritte.

• “Gangsters is to the 1970s what The Prisoner was to the 1960s—a playful, knowing and mildly crazed production but today it bears an important warning from the past to us.” John Quin on the extraordinary vitality of Philip Martin’s Play For Today and the BBC drama serial spun-off from it.

• New music: Juxtapositions by Boddy | Scanner; Embodied Shadow Of Thy Secret Mind by Philippe Blache; Light on Water by Modern Apartments.

• At Public Domain Review: Metamorphosis: Transformations in the Early Modern Flap Book (early 19th century).

Maeterlinck would write of [The Great God Pan], “it is, I believe, the attempt had been made to combine the traditional, or diabolical Fantasy with the new scientific kind, and that such a mixture has produced the most disturbing work I have ever come across”. Maeterlinck’s description of Machen serves as a tidy introduction to the crux of Ray’s writings too. A writer equally perplexed, intrigued, and possessed by the “the terrifying, hypergeometric, fourth dimension”. Ray’s works span the thin fabric of reality, piercing through into other eternal worlds and abducted by its eternal horror. Ray’s worlds are numerous realities battling one another, overlapping, mimicking, and distorting; it is an evocation of time and space as a battle-field of alternativities, governed by strange supernatural forces, notably angels or the occult.

The London of the Imagination, an examination of the fictional metropolis as it manifests in the stories of Belgian writer, Jean Ray

• Mixes of the week: A Slomo mix for The Invisible College, and DreamScenes – September 2026 at Ambientblog.

• At Colossal: “Spanning 200+ works, a new book celebrates the world of fungi“.

• The Electric Music Machine: Five Days at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop (1988).

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Ege Basalt.

• Matt Cargill’s favourite albums.

• RIP Jeremy Thomas.

• Metamorphosis (1970) by Ananda Shankar | Metamorphosis (1995) by Pet Shop Boys | Metamorphosis (2012) by Demdike Stare

Italo Calvino: L’écrivain perché

The first minute of this Franco-German documentary doesn’t present a title in English but the French title, L’écrivain perché, refers to Le Baron perché, one of Italo Calvino’s earliest novels which English readers know as Baron in the Trees. The novel isn’t the first of Calvino’s flights of fancy—The Cloven Viscount preceded it—but in borrowing its title the documentary suggests that the tree-dwelling Baron’s new way of living and viewing the world was personally significant for its author, something supported by the opening interview clip.

A promising start, then, so it’s a shame that the documentary as a whole isn’t very satisfying. As with last week’s science-fiction documentary, the best parts are the extracts from interviews with Calvino himself, and I’d have preferred to see more of these than hear from random individuals (the inevitable academics, an American writer, a musician) whose comments aren’t without value but who use up time that might have been better spent describing for those unfamiliar with Calvino’s work the origin and structure of his fictions. I can tell you, for example, that the stories in Cosmicomics (1965) are the closest that Calvino came to outright science fiction; that The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1969) is a novel based around a series of Tarot readings, with the layout of those readings appearing beside the text in the book; that Invisible Cities (1972) is a book-length conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan in which the Venetian explorer presents capsule descriptions of the places he’s encountered on his travels; that If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979) is a masterpiece of self-reflexive writing… And so on. The documentary, unfortunately, tells you none of these things, and hardly mentions these books at all, leaving the unfamiliar viewer with no clue as to why Calvino became one of Italy’s most popular writers during his lifetime, and why he continues to be popular today. One of the worst examples of this is when his French translator talks about Calvino’s relocation to Paris in 1967, an event which brought him into the orbit of the Oulipo writers. There’s a brief explanation of the Oulipo group using formal constraints to reinvent their fiction but no mention of what this meant to Calvino or whether the formal restraints in the novels and stories he produced after 1967 were influenced by Oulipo or not.

I wouldn’t usually spend so much time writing about something which was dissatisfying but, as with the SF documentary, this felt like a missed opportunity. Arte is a public service channel that produces many similar arts documentaries. The Calvino one is well-made, subtitled in English throughout, and contains a large quantity of photographs and scarce film footage which must have taken time to assemble. Despite his continued popularity Italo Calvino has been very poorly served by Anglophone documentaries. The BBC interviewed him in 1985, the last year of his life, but the introduction to the man and his work was crammed into half an episode of Bookmark when he should have been profiled at greater length in an episode of Arena as Jorge Luis Borges was in 1982. Calvino said in the BBC film that he disliked being interviewed—he says something similar in one of the clips here—but he still spent enough time sitting in front of cameras to help support a better documentary.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• More Invisible Cities (and an invisible author)
• Invisible Cities: Miscellanea
• Seeing Calvino: Invisible Cities
• Gérard Trignac’s Invisible Cities
• Colleen Corradi Brannigan’s Invisible Cities
• Le Città In/visibili
• Mikhail Viesel’s Invisible Cities
• Bookmark: Italo Calvino
• Crossed destinies revisted
• Crossed destinies: when the Quays met Calvino
• Tressants: the Calvino Hotel

It’s Fantastic! It’s Futuristic! It’s Fatalistic! It’s Science Fiction!

There’s a worthwhile documentary struggling to be born in this film which is compromised by its hyperbolic title and a running time of 48 minutes, not nearly enough to contain a history of science fiction, past and present. I’m not a media historian so I can’t say whether this was the first serious examination of written science fiction made for British TV but if it wasn’t there wouldn’t have been many that preceded it. It’s Fantastic! It’s Futuristic! It’s Fatalistic! It’s Science Fiction! was broadcast in 1973 as part of the BBC’s Omnibus art strand; Harley Cokeliss (credited here as “Cokliss”) was the director, and also the co-writer with Michael Abrams. Two years prior to this Cokeliss had made a shorter BBC film, Crash!, which explored JG Ballard’s ongoing preoccupation with automobile accidents via the rehearsals for Crash in The Atrocity Exhibition. Ballard turns up again here, theorising energetically about his usual concerns (mass advertising, the media landscape, etc) from a balcony overlooking Heathrow airport.

Cokeliss opens proceedings with the inevitable collage of clips from Flash Gordon and Hollywood films of the 1950s, most of which are appalling quality. If nothing else, this is a good reminder of how terrible feature films used to look when shown on TV. More interesting for today’s viewer is the record of a handful of writers who were seldom personally visible in the mass media even while their stories were being adapted by film and television. Ballard and Brian Aldiss are the representative Brits, all the other writers are Americans: Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Damon Knight, Frederik Pohl and Kurt Vonnegut. Also interviewed is Fritz Lang, who repeats his anecdote about Metropolis being inspired by his visit to New York in the 1920s, and Forrest J. Ackerman is filmed inside his memorabilia-filled house. The absence of women interviewees is unfortunately typical of the time. Kate Wilhelm appears on camera with husband Damon Knight but it’s Knight that does all the talking.

All of the interviews are far too brief for such a wide-ranging subject but it’s still fascinating to see Harlan Ellison at his peak, talking (and typing) at speed. It’s also surprising to find JG Ballard and Frederik Pohl in near agreement when they both describe science fiction as being a reflection of the present as much as it is it is a look into the near or distant future, “a mythology of the Space Age” as Ballard liked to describe it. Science fiction is often both these things simultaneously, predictive and reflective, something its critics don’t always seem to appreciate.

Documentaries also reflect the times in which they’re made, and this is another arts documentary that plunders the prog-rock shelves for its soundtrack music, placing a few bars of Close To The Edge by Yes over shots of New York’s teeming crowds. Harley Cokeliss really should have been given a series instead of a single film in which he flies all over America to capture nothing more than a few brief soundbites. But in 1973 the genre was lucky to get this much attention from one of the BBC’s serious arts outlets. Managerial attitudes did change later in the decade, probably as a result of the resurgence in popularity of SF cinema. In 1979 the BBC made a five-part series about science fiction, Time Out of Mind, where four of the programmes were profiles of single writers—Arthur C. Clarke, John Brunner, Michael Moorcock, and Anne McCaffrey—with other writers appearing in each film. A fifth episode concerned the SF convention that took place in Brighton that year. Ray Bradbury was given the full Omnibus treatment a year later in The Illustrated Man, a typically fine David Wheatley profile, while Philip K. Dick received a posthumous appraisal from Arena in 1994.

Here in 2026 we find ourselves in the future being grasped at in the 1970s where television has now abandoned expensive author profiles unless the author in question is massively popular or the winner of a Nobel prize. With everyone owning a pocket-sized recording device anyone can now make their own television, and so YouTube fills up with hours of amateurish video of people talking into laptops and webcams with poor visuals and dreadful sound. A good documentary is always more than a stream of raw footage; contextualisation and editorial point-of-view are essential, as well as whatever artistry the director might bring to the material. The frame is important, in other words, however compromised that frame may be.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Future Life magazine
• Science Fiction Monthly