The Best Thing About The Bing

The Bing Concert Hall, Stanford University's newest building devoted to the arts, is going to be an exciting addition to the west coast music scene when it opens in January 2013. The Kronos Quartet and Laurie Anderson are producing a new piece in the space; world-class ensembles like the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra are jostling to perform there. And it'll certainly enrich students' performing experiences.

I took a tour of the building site yesterday along with the head of Stanford Lively Arts, Jenny Bilfield, and a few other guests.

It is possible, however, to quickly get concert hall building fatigue. Every hall these days is being built with eco-friendly materials. Multimedia capabilities are de rigueur.

I'm not complaining. These are all good things. But what can a new concert hall do to differentiate itself from the pack?

The 844-seat Bing doesn't have a whole lot about it that makes it stand out as far as I can tell from what I gleaned from the tour, except for one characteristic that caught my attention:

Because the space is like a nest -- the copious stage is in the round with seats on encircling it, it's possible for performers to rotate themselves to face the seats "behind" the stage at the back of the hall. The rest of the auditorium can be darkened to create a more intimate feel for a chamber concert or other small event that requires less capacity.

I love this idea and I can't wait to see it in action.

Death Speaks

They might look like ants in the photograph I snapped on my iPhone from my faraway vantage point at Stanford's Dinkelspiel Hall last night, but the people standing on the stage are today's GIANTS OF CLASSICAL MUSIC, at least certain circles might think so.

Three of the performers -- Bryce Dessner (guitar), Shara Worden (vocals and bass drum) and Owen Pallett (violin) -- are indie pop / underground New York art scene mavens. Their names are most closely associated with such modish rockers as Bon Iver, Sufjan Stevens and Grizzly Bear. The fourth person on stage, composer Nico Muhly (piano), is a darling of the contemporary classical scene, where blurred genre boundaries are as much the rage as mullet hairdos and black eyeliner on men.

The piece that the quartet performed on stage was the world premiere of Death Speaks, a song cycle by David Lang inspired by the songs of Schubert in which Death features as a "flesh and blood" character who often speaks, rather than a faceless metaphor ("Death and the Maiden" is perhaps the most famous example of this personification of the grim reaper in Schubert's oeuvre.) Lang's piece was co-commissioned by Stanford Lively Arts and Carnegie Hall.

As Lang astutely put it in the program notes: "Art songs have been moving out of classical music in the last many years -- indie rock seems to be the place where Schubert's sensibilities now lie, a better match for direct storytelling and intimate emotionality."

For better and for worse, I kind of agree with the composer -- the confessional, quasi-whining style of the likes of Rufus Wainwright seems like the place where the modern art song sits right now.

The problem is that this incarnation of the art song isn't often very good.

The key error that Lang makes with Death Speaks is to conceive it as a partner piece for his luminous work, The Little Match Girl Passion. Match Girl (which Paul Hillier's Theatre of Voices performed adequately but not terribly movingly last night) is a dark, frigidly cold piece with -- when it's done with precision and careful attention to seamless line like the performance I heard in Los Angeles as part of the Jacaranda Music Series last year -- a strong, deeply warm heart. For the most part though, the work is a hesitant thing, full of sputtering phrases that disappear into the icy musical ether and glacial energy.

To then follow up that piece with another work that is equally slow and low-energy, as is the case with Death Speaks, is a mistake. Lang's new cycle, I'm afraid to say, is laborious, repetitive and extremely dull. The mood remains pretty much the same -- dark and dirge-like -- throughout. The performers last night exacerbated this fact by hiding within themselves and playing the work in a sort of reverie. I couldn't have felt more detached from the music by the end of the show. The only thing that stood out for me was the opening song, which reminded me of Dido's insistent incantation, "Remember Me," in her lament at the end of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas.

Sadly, I don't think I'll remember much about last night's musical experience.

The live cult(ure) of public transportation

A soiree devoted to people sharing their stories about Bay Area public transportation doesn't seem like it would be a hot ticket.

But when MUNI Diaries, a web-based resource devoted to collecting and curating Bay Area residents' thoughts and images about MUNI, BART, CalTrans and the various other municipal transportation services in the region regularly packs in the crowds. Saturday night's event at The Elbo Room, a bar and dance club in the Mission District, was sold out and the line to get in at the door stretched down the block.

If you think about, it, it's not that surprising that MUNI Diaries Live would attract so many people. After all, riding the bus, light rail, underground or train is such a communal experience for people who live in cities and suburban areas that the impulse to share stories provides a way for people to connect in a visceral way.

Plus, San Francisco is a literary town and people like to get up on stage and spin yarns. For another thing, MUNI Diaries live has a lower barrier to entry than other live storytelling projects going on around town such as the Pop Up Magazine, which takes place in front of several thousand people at Davies Symphony Hall, is very carefully curated months ahead of time and regularly attracts big-name literati.

MUNI Diaries is curated. The lineup on Saturday included the musician Pinched Nerve, who kicked off the show with a song entitled “Back Door, Step Down!” -- a familiar cry to anyone who's ever had trouble getting off a bus in San Francisco (or watching someone else struggle with bus mechanics), writer Jan Richman, KTVU traffic reporter Sal Castaneda, Comedian Caitlin Gill (who stole the show in my opinion with her hilarious and sad story of riders'self-centeredness in the face of an extreme situation), Glynn Washington, executive producer of NPR’s Snap Judgment, and author/editor Stephen Elliott. I was also part of the performance. More about that below.

But unlike other curated live media events, several audience members at the MUNI Diaries show also got the chance to come up on stage, share stories about their public transportation experiences and win prizes for their efforts.

MUNI Diaries Live is very much about community and that's it's greatest strength. Most of the stories -- including the one I told, or rather sang, in the form of an Elizabethan five-part madrigal with some friends, all of us dressed in ruffs culled from the Stanford Drama Department costume shop -- are gross-out tales of woe. Mine was about receiving a big, slobbery kiss from an extremely smelly tramp on BART one day a few years ago. Vomit, urine, blood and other bodily fluids frequently appear on the roster. It's all good, unclean fun.

Besides the sense of community togetherness that the event inspires, MUNI Diaries live also a fascinating example of how a media organization can forge strong, sticky connections with its constituents by combining an online presence with a live event.

More about Saturday night's show can be found here. Travel safely.

The Living Earth Show: Adventures In Quartertones

Percussionist Andrew Meyerson and guitarist Travis Andrews of The Living Earth Show, a chamber music ensemble based in San Francisco, have embarked upon an unusual project -- to build quartertone instruments in order to play a piece by the composer Brian Ferneyhough. In today's guest blog post on 'lies like truth,' Myerson writes about his inspiration and process...

When Travis Andrews and I learned that one of our favorite composers,
Brian Ferneyhough, had composed a piece for our instrumentation –
percussion and guitar – we immediately decided that our ensemble, The
Living Earth Show, was going to perform it. Only upon receipt of the
score did we discover that Renvoi/Shards was actually scored for
quartertone-guitar and quartertone-vibraphone: instruments capable of
sounding twenty-four notes to an octave, as opposed to the standard
western classical equal-tempered twelve-tone scale. The fact that
the piece required instruments that need to be custom built gave us
about an afternoon’s worth of hesitation. The more thought and
discussion we gave to the project, however, the more excited we became
to build these instruments and become an ensemble capable of
performing microtonal music.

As a percussionist, my forays into microtonality have been few and far
between. Apart from keyboard percussion, the overwhelming majority of
the solo percussion repertoire eschews “tonality” in every sense,
leaving the “pitch” of each percussion instrument indeterminate (there
is no better way to irritate a percussionist than to suggest “tunings”
for his or her concert toms). However, many composers who helped
define the idiom of percussion music in the twentieth century
explored, been fascinated by, and worked within the microtonal
tradition. Among many others, Stockhausen, Varese, Penderecki,
Lucier, Boulez, and Ligeti all utilized tonal systems that expanded
the traditional twelve-note octave. Xenakis, for example, felt that
quartertone systems allow sonorities to become “more alive,” creating
dissonances and beats that he believed “enriched” his work. Though
quartertones may not be a new phenomenon, they are part of a musical
tradition that pushes musical boundaries and questions the very
framework of western musical thought – a tradition we are inspired by
and hope to continue.

In a 1925 article explaining his quartertone compositions to skeptical
American public, Charles Ives wrote that “it will probably be
centuries, at least generations, before man will discover all or even
most of the value in a quarter-tone extension. And when he does,
nature has plenty of other things up her sleeve. And it may be loner
than we think before the ear will freely translate what it hears and
instinctively arouse and amplify the spiritual consciousness. But
that needn’t keep anyone from trying to use a few more of the myriads
of sound waves nature has put around in the air for man to catch if he
can and ‘perchance make himself a part with nature,’ as Thoreau used
to say.” Nearly a century has passed, and whether man has discovered
all the value of quarter-tones remains to be seen. But damned if
we’re not going to take Ives’ advice and try to use a few more
soundwaves as we launch into our 2012 season and beyond.

The Living Earth Show has launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund their project. To find out about it and become a supporter, please click here.

Christopher Maltman

I fell in love with the British baritone Christopher Maltman's voice when I was scouting around iTunes for a recoding of Ralph Vaughan Williams' Songs of Travel. That was about three years ago. I listened to many different artists'  samples of the song cycle and Maltman's was the one that spoke to me the most. Since then, I have devoured his recordings.

Last night, at Herbst Theatre, I finally got to hear him live. Maltman sang a recital under the auspices of San Francisco Performances with pianist Malcolm Martineau.

What a gig.

The thing that impressed me most was the suave silkiness of Maltman's tone -- he is the vocal equivalent of a matinee idol.

Secondly, I was entranced by the dynamic between the singer and pianist. For two hours they carried on a flowing conversation with one another without exchanging a single word. Music was the language they spoke and every note danced.

Thirdly, the repertoire choices were intriguing. The first half of the program was devoted to songs with Venice as a theme. I had never heard the song cycle Venezia: Six Chansons en dialecte venitien by the early 20th century French composer Reynaldo Hahn. It's a vibrant, cheeky piece full of romance and spice. It's stuffed with kitschy moments, but the melodies spiral winsomely and the harmonies are lush. Maltman and Martineau played it with humor and panache and the audience was hooked form start to finish.

My only regret of the evening was that the there were too many empty seats.

Brainstorming the media landscape of the future

“Go, you wild bedfellow, you cannot soothsay.”
                         - William Shakespeare, Antony & Cleopatra, Act 1 Scene 2


We all wish we had the power to predict what the world will look like in five, 10 or 50 years.

As a sector currently undergoing turbulent change, the media industry is frantically shaking a cloud-filled crystal ball up and down in the hopes of figuring out what the future holds.

On January 18 2012, the John S Knight Journalism Fellows at Stanford received an opportunity to toss the crystal ball around as guests at the Institute for the Future, (IFTF.)

IFTF is a Palo Alto-based nonprofit research group whose stated mission is to help organizations “make better, more informed decisions about the future.”
The afternoon-long workshop provided us with a glimpse of how the IFTF goes about the forecasting process. It turns out that future-gazing is not as mystical as one might think.

Sig-what?
The goal of the workshop – to explore the future of news and journalism – was largely focused on brainstorming. Together with staff and affiliate researchers from the IFTF, we took it in turns to share “signals” for the future of the media.

A signal is an existing example that indicates the shape of the future. e.g. a prototype service, a lab demo or a current news item.

“Signals are things that exist today in the environment around us such as a scientific discovery, usage pattern or technology,” said Marina Gorbis, the executive director of IFTF and leader of our workshop. “Right now a signal typically exists on the fringe. But we see it as an indicator of a larger trend.”

The task wasn’t simply to share ideas about the latest media-centric iPhone app or crowd-sourced content strategy. Marina and her team also charged us with inferring what an existing signal says about a future trend for journalism.
Over the course of about 90 minutes, we came up with a voluminous slew of signals and trends, filling the long white-board at the front of IFTF’s workspace with dozens of colorful sticky notes. Marina and her colleague Mike Liebhold (a distinguished fellow at the Institute) then tried to organize the ideas into clusters representing various trend areas.

The future is now
The breadth of ideas we came up with suggests nothing if not an excitingly multi-dimensional future for our industry – a future that is already in embryonic stage today.

For example, the existence of norran.se, a Swedish website which enables readers to participate in the editorial decision-making process, and the “sousveillance” movement, point to deeper public involvement in news-gathering and disseminating in the years ahead; the demise of the personal computer and rise of the “deckchair-friendly” tablet interface suggest a bigger market for the consumption of longer-form journalism; meanwhile, the increasing prevalence of non-native-language news sources in various parts of the world illustrates a trend towards the trans-border news interests of a switched-on society that is deeply curious about how people in other cultures feel and think.

A robust future?
From capitalizing on new interfaces and platforms for the dissemination of news to creating innovative forms of algorithmic journalism that tailor information to suit a user’s location, interests and even mood, the media industry has plenty of room for a robust future.

Of course, while there is no shortage of interesting ways in which our sector can grow in the years ahead, one thing remains cloudy in that crystal ball: how anyone is going to make any money. Not even the augurs at IFTF have a handle on that.

Pixar becomes hub for social entrepreneurs

The atrium at Pixar Animation Studios in Emeryville, CA, made for a fitting setting for The Intersection, an event which brought together thinkers and doers from a variety of disciplines to exchange ideas about social innovation. The lofty space was conceived by Pixar CEO Steve Jobs to be a place that would force employees from all parts of the organization to intersect with one another on a daily basis by virtue of its central location. All paths lead there, like veins and aorta to and from the heart.

As such, the venue stood as a nice metaphor for what the inaugural Intersection event was striving to achieve: a point of idea-generating connection created as a result of bringing together people from very disparate professional backgrounds.

With a participant list of just 350 people and a speaker lineup that included actress Susan Sarandon, Pixar President Ed Catmull, IDEO CEO Tim Brown and Frans Johansson, author of The Medici Effect, the event piqued my curiosity. It's not the sort of thing I'd usually think of attending. But this year, as I'm spending my time as a John S Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford, I'm leading myself down some unlikely paths. I'm intent on following my nose.

Things got off to a promising start with Johannson's energetic keynote speech. The presenter demonstrated with eloquence and humor how great entrepreneurs have solved problems by finding the connecting point between two completely different fields of inquiry. For example, an architect built a huge office building in Harare without air conditioning by exploring termite ecology. (Termite colonies have figured out how to keep their homes at a consistent temperature by channeling the air in the termite hills.) In another example, a Muslim fashion designer enabled burqa-wearing women to be comfortable when swimming in the water by creating the "burqini," an ingenious and rather trendy top-to-toe lycra outfit that's much more comfortable to wear in the water than the heavy black cotton daywear that is the norm for observant Muslim ladies who fancied getting wet once in a while.

A discussion between Catmull and Brown also yielded some interesting insights -- The notion that Brown put forward of looking to the extremes of society to help design solutions for the middle of the market resonated particularly strongly. For example, when IDEO is working on designing a new consumer kitchen appliance, the company's researchers don't go and talk to typical consumers of kitchen appliances. They talk to "extreme" users of culinary tools like professional chefs or children.

Other highlights of the day included the delicious lunch (much better than anything I've had at a corporate networking event) and a short vocal performance by Voices in Harmony, a men's a cappella group based in Silicon Valley. (Pictured above, singing a schmaltzy but sweet ode to Steve Jobs accompanied by projected photos from the Pixar and Apple CEO's life.)

But despite several positive aspects, the team behind the event (a consortium of social innovation and investment groups and consultancies) will need to make some tweaks in time for the next iteration of The Intersection, which is already scheduled for January 19 2013.

For one thing, the day is too long and way too passive. After hours of listening to talking heads talk, I craved the opportunity to be more active. The numerous networking opportunities didn't quite cut it for me -- I wanted a few more tangible interactions and activities.

For another, some of the people up on stage left much to be desired. The worst offender was the person charged with moderating the discussion involving Susan Sarandon and model/entrepreneurial fashionista Lauren Bush. She was a terrible timekeeper, rambled on for minutes on end without actually asking a question of the guests and was apparently oblivious to the guy standing by the stage frantically holding up "5 minute warning" and "Stop" signs for ages beyond the session's scheduled end time. The barrage of tweets flying around ("Worst. Moderator. Ever.") indicated widespread frustration at the woman's utter lack of sensitivity and self-centeredness.

Would I attend this event again? Probably not if I had to pay for it.

Debussy’s “Martyr”: A Poisoned Arrow

On last week's VoiceBox, composer and blogger Brian Rosen and I explored the theme of "badness" in vocal music. You can read Brian's accompanying blog post on the broadcast here.

Towards the end of the show, we talked about songs that possess many of the qualities shared by sub-par efforts and yet somehow transcend things like inane lyrics, wavering intonation, a dirge-like melody and inept musical instrument mastery to enter the rarified realm of the "so bad it's good." Brian presented a compelling case for The Shaggs in this regard.

I was thinking about this transcendent category of bad music while attending a performance by the San Francisco Symphony over the weekend of Le Martyr de Saint Sebastien, a lavish musical spectacle created by Claude Debussy based on poetry by Gabriele d'Annunzio.

The piece is a misfire on a massive scale. Even the program notes allude openly to its "perfumed" writing and overall sense of "kitsch." Program annotator Michael Steinberg even goes as far as to quote the impresario who produced the premiere, Gabriel Astruc, as saying: "I don't understand it at all. I have brought together the greatest musician, the greatest poet, the greatest designer, the greatest choreographer--and it's bad!"

Michael Tilson Thomas, who led the orchestra in the concerts which drew on the forces of a massive orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony Chorus and a coterie of soloists helmed by the great vocalist Frederica von Stade in the spoken role of The Narrator (Sebastian himself), obviously thought that the work was worth resuscitating.

I'm afraid I disagree. Even Frederica von Stade with her beautiful French accent couldn't bring life to d'Annunzio heavy-handed and stilted prosody. The video projections featuring a lightly-clad male dancer cavorting and a big supine lily, and the soloists billowing gospel-singer-like robes added a layer of camp silliness to the proceedings. Debussy's music has something going for it, at least. There are spine-tingling spectral moments and ardently lush choral episodes. The orchestra and chorus acquitted themselves well. But with all the stage business going on, it was hard to really home in on whatever musical merits the work possesses.

I'm grateful that the Symphony played Janacek's silvery Sinfonietta in the first half of the program. It's one of the greatest pieces ever written for an orchestra and it created a sharp contrast with the much more highly-hyped puff piece that made up the second half.

The fact that Debussy composed the music for Le Martyre in the same year that San Francisco Symphony was founded (1911) is not a good enough reason to resurrect the work for the orchestra's 100th anniversary season.

Head of Google News Likens Journalists to Musicians

Richard Gingras, Head of News Products, Google, came to talk to my John S Knight Journalism Fellowship class yesterday. He's a thoughtful man, whose hangdog, droopy-eyed expression belies a sharp mind and understated sense of humor.

I was struck by many things that Gingras said, which included his belief that current attempts to personalize news searches are pointless as they don't accurately reflect people's interests and personalities. The gist of what Gingras said was, "If I happen to have read six stories about Tahrir Square on one day, that doesn't necessarily mean I'm interested in Egyptian politics."

Most palpable to a culture journalist, however, was his riff on business models for journalism, where he likened the work of a journalist today to that of a musician.

Gingras said that as in music, there will be a few people in journalism at the top of the profession who make a lot of money, a slightly bigger layer below that where journalists making a decent living, a layer below that where an even larger number of people are making some income, and a vast pool at the very bottom where, for no particular reason, journalism is created purely out of passion with little or no financial reward.

I think culture journalists, because they are close to the arts world both economically and socially, have been attuned to this reality for a while now so the comparison makes perfect sense. But perhaps this analogy comes as a revelation to journalists working in other fields and beats.

The Artist — A Silent Movie Where Sound Matters Most

The most palpable effect of "The Artist," Michel Hazanavicius' beautiful homage to the tail end of the silent cinema era and movie-making's uneasy transition to talkies, is that it makes the audience member acutely attuned to their sense of hearing. I don't think my ears have ever listened so intently at a cinema until I caught the film at CineArts in Palo Alto last night.

This might seem counterintuitive -- "The Artist" is almost shot entirely as a silent film, with title cards used to describe key moments of dialogue.

Yet because of the lack of conventional dialogue, every sound both on screen and off pops like the heavy makeup around a silent move star's eyes.

Ludovic Bource's lush musical score, which evokes the era represented in the film without pandering to cliche, underscores key moments thrillingly and emotionally. And when Hazanavicius uses sound effects at two key points during the story, the sound has the effect of taking us (as well as the characters on screen) completely by surprise. It's a masterful use of audio both as a means of story development and metaphor.

Beyond the movie's brilliant use of audio, I was also very taken by how many sounds I picked up around me in the cinema. Usually I don't notice rustling popcorn containers, coughing or whispering unless these sounds are happening in a very persistent and loud way in my near vicinity. But while watching "The Artist," every tiny environmental sound came to my attention.

The weird thing was, that far from being distracting, these sounds somehow made the movie-going experience more palpable: "The Artist" is all about the visceral relationship between cinema and audience and as a result of the film's unusual use of sound, the connection seemed all the stronger.

P.S. The movie is also a lot of fun. It made me want to rush out and acquire a pair of tap show and a terrier.

Why is society so coy about criticizing classical music?

I recorded a VoiceBox episode on Friday on the subject of "terrible songs" in collaboration with Jim Nayder, the host of NPR Chicago's Annoying Music Show, and Brian Rosen, a Bay Area-based composer and arts blogger.

The task was to dissect well-known vocal music aberrations (we covered everything from The Shaggs' "My Pal Foot Foot" to Rebecca Black's "Friday") according to what we called "the elements of badness." These elements are the various qualities that many sub-par vocal compositions possess in common such as crumby or smug lyrics, monotonous/grating melody, poor intonation and overuse of Auto-Tune.

One thing that came up in discussion is how coy our society generally is about voicing a negative opinion about classical music. Few people have qualms about skewering a bad pop song. But beyond narrow-focused musicologists steeped in the world of academic journals and conferences, faulting a Mozart aria or Schubert lied is "just not done." And relatively few people besides the handful of professional critics that are still plying their trade today come flat out against contemporary works.

Performances/interpretations of classical music works are fairer game for derision -- Florence Foster Jenkins makes an appearance on our VoiceBox program, naturally. But in general, the criticism is not serious. And while classical music critics might fault a singer for not performing an aria or art song as well as they might, it's rare to come across a review which completely destroys a vocal performance.

Classical music is more of a niche genre than pop music, of course, so there are fewer "worst of" lists anyway and fewer people sharing widely-disseminated opinions about classical pieces. This explains in part why there is so little discussion along these lines.

I think what it boils down to, though, is that society at large is scared to judge classical music. It's still so very entrenched in the establishment and regarded as "high brow." Perhaps people think that to deride classical music is to highlight one's own poor taste. Ultimately, it's easier somehow to make fun of something truly alien to many western sensibilities, like Chinese opera or Mongolian throat singing for instance, than to condemn a piece of occidental art music.

On Treacle Mining and Protecting One’s Trousers from Invasions of Rats

One thing England still does very well during the holidays in spite of competition from the end-of-year sales, is a vivid line in eccentric niche cultural traditions.

I spent this Boxing Day afternoon standing under threatening skies outside The Phoenix Pub in the town of Faversham, sipping mulled wine as a bunch of bearded blokes wearing colorful sashes, top hats, white shirts, braces (suspenders) and corduroy trousers (pants) tied just under the knee with rough brown rope, thundered gracefully up and down in a display of "Molly Dancing."

Molly Dancing is a rogue branch of traditional Morris Dancing (you know, the guys who skip about wearing bells and waving hankies) which was traditionally done by out of work ploughboys in midwinter in the 19th century. There are no bells and hankies in Molly, but it has its own peculiarities: All the male dancers perform in blackface and one of their number, known as "the molly," capers about cross-dressed as a woman in frilly cap and billowing skirts.

It's an energetic art form that requires the dancers to perform intricate footwork and high-kneed skips in tight spaces wearing extremely heavy boots with nails in the soles. Wikipedia has a user-friendly overview of molly dancing here.

The members of the Seven Champions Molly Dancing troupe (or "side" as a group of molly dancers is known in local parlance) which was the group that was dancing at the Phoenix today, have wonderful answers to the inevitable questions that audiences ask them about what on earth it is that they think they're doing.

For instance, when I asked my friend James, a member of Seven Champions, why the dancers perform in blackface, he replied that it's because they all work down a treacle mine. And when I asked him about the bits of tatty rope wrapped around their trousers, he said, "it's to stop the rats from getting lost up there."

This link explains all.

PS According to Wiki-P, the University of Aberdeen ethnomusicologist Elaine Bradtke wrote a PhD thesis on the inherent post-modernism of the Seven Champions. Gosh, it's nice to be home.

Oh I Do Like to be Beside the Seaside...

Few urban environments in the UK offer such radical cultural contrasts as Margate. The seaside town located in the southeast of England which I visited today with my parents who live in nearby Canterbury, is going through a bad case of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder these days.

Up until the mid 20th century, Margate was a thriving resort. My dad remembers taking family vacations there as a child. The place attracted its fair share of celebrities, including T S Eliot, who reputedly wrote part of The Wasteland in a windswept shelter (pictured) close to the sea. In earlier times, King George III's brother lived in the middle of town, in a grand house on Cecil Square.

Today, that building is occupied by a NatWest Bank.

It was at this bank today that my dad found himself held up at gunpoint by a robber while trying to make a transaction at the counter. The assaulter fled, the police came, no one was hurt. Needless to say, my father didn't finish his transaction.

It was hard to believe that only half an hour before this incident, he, my mum and I had been wandering around the sparkling Turner Contemporary museum -- an amazing new addition to Margate's waterfront. We had taken in a somewhat unfocused yet eye-catching exhibition dedicated to youth culture in the 20th century featuring works by an eclectic array of artists including Phil Collins, Diane Arbus and the museum's namesake, JMW Turner. We followed that up with a gourmet lunch at the museum's cafe -- all local-organic this and sustainably-harvested that -- and then pottered around the revitalized "Old Town" area with its multitude of trendy vintage boutiques and art galleries.

Our stroll through town made me see Margate in a new light. No more a derelict, seaside town, the sort of place that might inspire Morrissey in his darkest moments, I thought.

And yet...

Though blue plaques detailing Margate's proud cultural heritage adorn buildings all over town, the city is still mired in muck. Crime in broad daylight. Drab, post-war buildings that look like they might collapse. Beautiful old facades in peeling paint disarray.

And that's to say nothing of Margate's effort at holiday decorations. The city is home to the saddest Christmas tree I've ever seen in a public place. Threadbare and keeling slightly to one side, the tree had been carelessly strung with a meagre spiral of weak lightbulbs which winked apologetically from the sickly evergreen's scrawny trunk.

I'm hoping that the museum, which is free to visit and was well-attended in the middle of the day, together with the slew of artisans making the most of Margate's relatively low-cost real estate, will gradually help to pull the town firmly out of the swamp.

Not that I'm completely comfortable with the squeaky yuppification that's going on in many small towns across the land. A city ought to have frayed edges. But its citizens and visitors should be able to walk around without feeling afraid.

Go Gareth Go

Gareth Malone is the British chorus world's answer to Jamie Oliver.

What Jamie has done to revolutionize people's appetite for home cooking, Gareth has done to bring them together in song.

I have been following Malone's trajectory with curiosity for the last few years since first hearing about the unlikely idea of a choirmaster as TV personality. But I didn't fully appreciate the power of Malone's TV series The Choir until tonight, when my mum turned on the television, saw what was on and said, "you should watch this, it's Gareth Malone."

Over the course of a couple of hours, I sat riveted as the thirty-something choirmaster, who cuts a nerdy-chic figure in Buddy Holly glasses, preppy blazers, knitted pullovers and trendy jeans, took a bunch of stoical army wives from a couple of British military bases and turned them into vocal superstars. In so doing, he also helped to give these women, who felt pretty isolated and emotionally drained, a potent sense of community and well-being.

At the start of the show, the ladies were mumbling their way apologetically through a song on home turf. By the end, they were singing with gusto and flair at the Royal Albert Hall before the Queen. All the while, they were soldiering on, fearing for the safety of their husbands, most of whom were serving long tours on the front-lines in Afghanistan. Added pathos came from the story of one tattooed military wife and mother, who at the start of the show, could barely summon up the courage to sing a note to herself, let alone a solo before a crowd. At the climax of the episode, she was belting out the solo part at the Royal Albert Hall in front of 5,000 audience members and millions of people watching at home.

OK, so the show was pretty schmaltzy and the simple musical arrangements of songs like the Whitney Houston hit "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" aren't exactly fascinating fodder for the ears. But if Malone's choral interventions don't make for compelling telly, I don't know what does.

Following in Jamie Oliver's footsteps, my mum tells me that Malone is headed to the States to work his magic there. I hope the choirmaster makes it as far as The Bay Area. I can think of several groups of people who would benefit from his touch, from the prisoners of San Quentin, to Silicon Valley engineers, to the kids currently starved of music education at any number of our public schools.

P.S. "Wherever You Are," the song that the military wives sang at Albert Hall, went on general release  in the UK on the 19th of December and is topping the charts for the holiday season.