First published in the Guardian on 18 December, 2017

Make America Great Again. Put the Great Back into Britain. Today’s populist slogans are obsessed with some imagined past. What does that have to do with baroque Christmas music?

In his book Playing With History, John Butt  — keyboardist, Bach scholar, Glasgow University’s Gardiner Professor of Music, director of the Dunedin Consort — writes about why we look back. The book was published in 2002 but the prescience for now is striking. Butt discusses the historically informed performance (HIP) movement in the context of populist nationalism, and climate change (“as we begin to perceive the limits of the earth’s resources, a culture of recycling becomes vital for our future survival”), and collective trauma (“the burgeoning of authoritative collected editions from 1950 might come in the wake of a war that had threatened to destroy virtually all the manuscript sources of western music”).

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First published in The Herald on 13 December, 2017

It’s that time. Here are twenty of my favourite classical releases of 2017. Expect a loose take on the term ‘classical’, and no rankings: how to score Bartok against Beethoven against Eliane Radigue against Roland Kayn? Oops, I’ve given away the shortlist.

Certain names seem to keep cropping up in these end of year lists. I always love the way pianist Steven Osborne plays French music – forget cliches of hazy impressionism, because his latest Debussy album (Hyperion) makes the boldest aspects stand out in ultra high definition. The goldfish in Poissons d’or move in jerks and sudden flashes. The water droplets in Reflets dans l’Eau are super crisp, like pointillism writ large. At the end of Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum, the tune rings out like a defiant shout. It’s not pretty, but it is exhilarating.

Another regular: the Chiaroscuro Quartet, who this year turned their collective hand to Haydn’s ‘Sun’ Quartets Nos. 4-6 (BIS), music of huge daring and rogue vision. The Chiaroscuros do big contrast with exquisite taste; Alina Ibragimova leads with grace and ferocity but this is real chamber music and the attack comes from all four corners.

“The experiment is always about whether something will hold,” says Toronto-based composer Linda Catlin Smith, who deals in subtler contrasts. She tests how sounds can be longer or shorter, thicker or thinner, higher or lower, more distant, more intimate. The results are mesmerising on her double album of chamber music, Drifter, with poised performances from Apartment House and the Bozzini Quartet (Another Timbre). Music of lilting, lonely beauty.

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First published in the Guardian on 6 December, 2017

In the early 1990s, the visionary accordionist/improvisor Pauline Oliveros wrote the soundtrack for an instructional feminist porn film called The Sluts and Goddesses Video Workshop. The film is presented and co-directed by Annie Sprinkle, a prostitute-turned-academic whose kooky lecture covers everything from deep breathing and vaginal bling to STD prevention and multi-minute ‘mega orgasms’. Meanwhile we get a spectacular sonic counterpart of drones, glitches, bleeps, twangs and pulsations. Conventional porn music this is not: no sultry saxophones, no oily bass guitars. Instead Oliveros made sounds that are fun, tactile and inquisitive in themselves. If Sprinkle’s mission was to confront industry standards of what erotic looks and acts like, thus empowering viewers to define their own tastes and experiences, Oliveros likewise reminded us that the agency to decide what music means should ultimately belong to the listener.

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First published in The Herald in July, 2011

I arrived in Montreal in early May, the morning after a general election. Talk in the cafes was gloomy: Canada had shuffled to the right, boosting Stephen Harper’s Conservative government from minority to forcible majority and leaving the French-speaking, left-leaning province of Quebec yet again at political odds with its neighbours. Francophone voters habitually ignore their Tory candidates. This time they’d also abandoned en masse their long-standing separatist Bloc Quebecois in favour of the young National Democrats — Canada’s new opposition party.

A couple of days later, Madeleine Careau simply shrugged at the strange results. ‘C’est bien normal,’ she explained; ‘le balancier quebecois’ — the Quebecois swing. Careau would know. As general manager of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, her job is dependant on Quebec’s political climate, and for much of the past two decades has had plenty volatility of its own. Dictatorial conductors, several rounds of industrial action, quick-changing popular support… Shrugging at melodrama must become a default reaction.

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