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By Root 771 0

But find them you do, and then what? Do you delete the ones that have no meaning or that are out of focus? No. You either leave them all where they are, in which case they will be lost for all of time when your hard drive crashes. Which, one day, I assure you it will. That, of course, is not as disastrous as losing a photograph album, because you will also have put them on Facebook in the mistaken belief that the rest of the world will somehow be interested in what you did on holiday. Frankly, I’d rather look at someone’s piles than their holiday pics. Or you carefully move them to a disc, which involves going into town, buying a packet of three, coming home, finding out you’ve bought the wrong ones, going back into town again and then finally getting everything transferred. It would be easier to set up an easel and break out the oils.

But before you do any of these things, I bet you have a little fiddle with the computer’s Paint Shop program. You start out imagining that you’ll put everything the right way up and maybe get rid of everyone’s red eye. But pretty soon you will be giving your children massive noses and making your family pets sepia. I always give my wife some horse’s ears, which makes her very angry.

And therein lies my problem with all this. At the moment, when a historian or a genealogist uncovers a faded picture from Victorian times, he will know it was a special occasion and that the person with his unsmiling face and ramrod back must either have been important or have done something worthwhile. But what will he be able to deduce when he leafs through the pictures we take today? Nothing. Except that we had machinegun-trigger fingers, enormous comedy noses and monochrome pets and we all got married in a fog of Vaseline on a swing.

Sunday 7 June 2009

Now there’s a first – my elephant has just exploded

Recently, a friend bet me that I would never begin a newspaper column by suggesting that the musical score of Ondine, a little-known ballet, is virtually identical to side one of Works: Volume One, the Emerson, Lake and Palmer double album from 1977.

I don’t normally go to the ballet. I usually have better things to do than sit about watching men standing on one leg for two hours. But last weekend I was taken by my ten-year-old daughter to the Royal Opera House to see Ondine. And here goes: I couldn’t help noticing that the score is virtually identical to side one of Works: Volume One, the Emerson, Lake and Palmer double album from 1977.

Now, we know Keith Emerson was not averse to dropping a bit of classical pomp into his prog-rockery. For Brain Salad Surgery, he lifted chunks of Hubert Parry’s score for ‘Jerusalem’, and on Pictures at an Exhibition, Mussorgsky is credited as a co-writer. I was always under the impression, though, that side one of Works, a towering classical achievement, was all Keith’s work. The album sleeve notes certainly suggest that. And yet there I was, in the ballet, not just recognizing phrases and chords, but predicting precisely what would come next. Because I’d heard it all before.

It would be wrong, of course, to suggest that Keith, a talented songwriter and knifeman, thought to himself: ‘The music from Ondine, a little-known ballet, has not been used to advertise tyres or chocolate. And chances are, no one who goes to the ballet will ever listen to ELP. So I’ll nick it.’ That would be a moral and legal outrage. So there must be another explanation. And there is. On a piano, there are only around twenty-five types of chord, each of which has twelve possible roots and can be inverted in a number of ways. Do the maths and it works out at around 8,400 possible combinations.

The simple fact of the matter, then, is that by about 1963, all those combinations and all the combinations of stringing them together had been used up. It is therefore inevitable that some pieces of music are going to sound pretty much identical to something that has gone before. And as a result of that, it is pointless for bands to record new music. We’ve heard it all before.

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