Blog is absent (mostly) again today …

I am travelling for a fair part of today and am reading a John le Carré novel – tracing the George Smiley series. I am also working on my next book. But it is a new year so all the best for 2018, although the dark clouds that are cast over the world do not make for very optimistic forecasting. I will be back tomorrow as usual. Some music that I have been listening to while flying is overleaf including an interesting story about the motivation of the composer.

This is a track from from the German-born, British-based, Post Minimalist composer Max Richter – On the Nature of Daylight.

It is from his 2004 record The Blue Notebooks, which is classical meeting ambient.

All the tracks on the album are in the minor key, reflecting is rather sombre yet angry message.

The UK Guardian article (July 8, 2016) – Millions of us knew the Iraq war would be a catastrophe. Why didn’t Tony Blair? – was written by Max Richter himself to explain why he wrote the pieces that appear on the album – Blue Notebooks.

His UK Guardian article was reflecting on the release of the Chilcot Report – which was released on July 6, 2016.

It provided a damning assessment of Tony Blair’s illegal and lying intervention into Iraq.

A UK Guardian article published on the day of the release (July 6, 2016) – Chilcot’s indictment of Tony Blair could hardly be more damning concluded that the Report:

… was an unprecedented, devastating indictment of how a prime minister was allowed to make decisions by discarding all pretence at cabinet government, subverting the intelligence agencies, and making exaggerated claims about threats to Britain’s national security

Two days later, Max Richter wrote that:

I composed my album The Blue Notebooks as a protest. And 13 years on, with the costs of the conflict clear, my fury at the man who took us there is unabated.

His analysis of Blair in the article is telling and at one point he writes:

Looking more deeply into why he might do this leads inevitably to the peculiar bromance that developed between Bush and Blair, the cowboy and his poodle, united in some sort of shared crusade. Blair’s hubristic view of himself as a moderating influence on the imbecile Bush betrays a spectacular miscalculation of the power dynamics in play. A third scenario is that Blair was simply too dumb to see what was coming down the tracks.

But any of these justifications for Blair’s actions – mad, bad or stupid – disqualify him from political high office …

Or disqualifying him from having any credibility in the on-going public debates within and beyond the British Labour Party.

Anyway, this is a case where one can resonate with the motivation for as well as the music itself.

Appearing on the track with Richter’s keyboard playing are Louisa Fuller (violin), Natalia Bonner (violin), John Metcalfe (violin), Philip Sheppard (cello), Chris Worsey (Cello)

Regular transmission returns tomorrow.

That is enough for today!

(c) Copyright 2018 William Mitchell. All Rights Reserved.