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STRATEGY FOR THE DAY: remain available

Many thanks to Iain Cameron for sending me a link to an article by Martin Anderson about Ian MacDonald. The article is thoughtful and accurate - Ian shared many similar stories with me - and well worth reading. I notice Anderson's article is no longer available in full at The Independent's web site so I'm including most of it here along with some of my responses at the end. If I get any copyright complaints, I'll remove it.

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Ian MacDonald

by Martin Anderson

Ian MacDonald wrote about music with a passion that sparked reactions of almost equal intensity among his readers. Unusually, he was regarded as an authority both in popular and classical music, on two markedly dissimilar subjects: Shostakovich and The Beatles. He met controversy head on, bravely enduring the opprobrium of those whose work he questioned, while his books earned the kind of reviews that are the stuff of publishers' dreams.

What has been labelled "the Shostakovich debate" began in 1979, with the publication of Testimony, the memoirs of the composer Dmitri Shostakovich, dictated to the musicologist Solomon Volkov three years before Shostakovich's death in 1975; the manuscript was smuggled out. Testimony, a bitter and brave book, revealed to a largely unsuspecting West that the Soviet Union's most vaunted composer, far from being a hapless stooge of the regime, was in truth a dedicated and courageous anti-Stalinist.

But Testimony walked straight into the guns of the Cold War. The KGB organised denunciations by Shostakovich's relatives and colleagues, and the campaign of disinformation helped persuade several prominent American musicologists that Volkov had exploited his association with Shostakovich to pass off a money-earning fake. Writers on the right seized on Testimony with told-you-so glee; the left insisted it was a falsehood, one commentator even asserting that it was the fruit of a CIA plot. The lines were drawn for musicology's most heated argument in decades, with the soul of the composer as the prize.

Into this febrile atmosphere, in 1990, stepped MacDonald's The New Shostakovich, which demonstrated close parallels between the Shostakovich of Testimony and the music itself and thus called the composer to the support of the memoirist. The book also revealed MacDonald's profound and detailed knowledge of the Soviet background without which, he argued, it was impossible to understand the music correctly.

The impact of The New Shostakovich was instantaneous. Norman Lebrecht described it as a "tour de force of musical and social analysis". The composer's son recommended it as "one of the best biographies of Dmitri Shostakovich I have read". Vladimir Ashkenazy wrote the author a letter of appreciation, and Semyon Bychkov felt it "gets under the skin of Shostakovich and understands the perversity of the Soviet system and what it has inflicted on humanity". For Richard Dyer, writing in The Boston Sunday Globe, it was the "most thorough study of this enigmatic figure yet undertaken in English (or Russian, for that matter)". MacDonald changed the nature of Shostakovich studies for ever.

...

The book which brought MacDonald the widest acclaim was his Revolution in the Head, subtitled "The Beatles' Records and the 1960s" and first published by Fourth Estate in 1994 (a second, enlarged edition appeared in 1997 and a paperback from Pimlico in 1998). In it he details every single Beatles' track recorded, describing the instrumentation (and who played what), the details of the recording and first release, analysing the music and relating it to the text. It was the most thorough examination the songs had ever received, and the press showered it with well-deserved praise.

"One of the most convincing cultural analyses of recent British musical history which you could ever hope to read", reported Peter Aspden in The Financial Times. "A pinnacle of popular music criticism", said The Independent; "In Ian MacDonald, The Beatles at last have a critic worthy of their œuvre." The Observer esteemed it "a dazzling piece of scholarship" - "Best of all, the book drives you back to the music itself with fresh ears and understanding". Stuart Maconie, writing in Q, rated it "the most sustainedly brilliant piece of pop criticism and scholarship for years. An astonishing achievement." The reviews must have exceeded his publisher's wildest hopes and yet MacDonald, with typical modesty, inscribed the copy he sent me: "I suspect this may go under your head. (No need to read it, of course!)"

Until the final depression began to sap his energy, it was always on call to serve his enthusiasms. When OUP published a study of Shostakovich by the American musicologist Laurel Fay (one of the Testimony doubters) which he felt was shamefully inadequate, his detailed and devastating review - posted at the website he maintained, "Music under Soviet Rule" (www.siue.edu/~aho/musov/musov.html) - ran to over 50,000 words. He corresponded regularly with scholars of Soviet music all around the world, usually giving generously of his time, and took an active interest in the disquieting development of Russian democracy. He leaves unfinished a study of David Bowie and a book called Birds, Beasts & Fishes: a guide to animal lore and symbolism - he empathised deeply with animals and felt a direct line of communication with cats in particular.

MacDonald believed - passionately, of course - in an after-life, and the spur to write The New Shostakovich came one night when he felt a prod in the back and heard an instruction from Shostakovich to write the book. That belief must have helped reconcile him to the decision to commit suicide. He had suffered from acute depression from around 1976 and attempted suicide twice in 1978 and 1979 (mentioning the fact openly in his writings), and had spent the last three years in an ever-blacker depression to which death eventually seemed the only solution. Praise for his most recent book, The People's Music, a collection of his writings on pop and rock published six weeks ago, was not enough to revive his spirits.

He was found dead at his home in Gloucestershire on Thursday morning, having posted a note on the door to call the police.

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I just want to add to a couple of thoughts that were sparked by Anderson' s piece...

Ian's uncompleted book Birds, Beasts & Fishes: a guide to animal lore and symbolism was to be a reference-style work, pulling together religious, mythological, and historical associations from around the world for each individual animal. It was an enormously ambitious project and probably not something one person should have tried to undertake alone, but it was typical of Ian that if a task needed to be done, he would give it everything he had, and it would be brilliant. Had he completed the work, it would have been not only an invaluable resource for writers, artists, and researchers, but a best-seller as well. The deeply resonant nature of the subject itself and Ian's own passion for and understanding of the shadow world that exists between objective fact and subjective experience worked together to create a compelling piece of writing. The project was so vast an undertaking I think it finally overwhelmed him and he had to put it aside. A book like this would require a battery of researchers and editors just to get a first edition into print. But it was characteristic of Ian to undertake it alone, to make it an expression of his scholarship and personal experience, just as he did in his other works.

Ian sent me a chapter from Birds, Beasts & Fishes. Here is the opening...

TIGER:
PSYCHOLOGICAL. Unconscious, Id, darkness, elemental energy, sacrifice, transformation.
RELIGIOUS. Destruction, retribution, wrath, passion, deceit, duplicity, Dionysius, Durga, Shiva, Pashupati, Kalachakra, Sun, Moon, Christ, the Devil.
SECULAR. Courage. martial prowess, strength, virility, ferocity, infanticide, fire, power, wealth, royalty, dignity, disdain, vulgar ostentation, chance, treachery, cunning, greed, lust, shapeshifter, vampire, were-tiger, witches, night.
PLANETARY RULER. Mars.

A tawny ripple of hunkered muscle in sun-streaked grass; a voice like a furnace falling ajar; pale lamp-eyes in a blazing mask; a night-walking fire in the tropic dark. Fiercer and wilder than anything else on earth, a living embodiment of power, the tiger is an archetypal dream creature. Where its lairs and secret lanes lie close to ours, this beast has invaded the human mind, generating myth and morality from phantasmal visions. In rural Sumatra, ethics are enforced by tigers: people imbibe what is right from tiger-dreams, and transgressors are punished by tiger-spirits who live, half-in and half-out of the material world, on the edge of the village. In Malaysia, tiger and man may, through sorcery, meld into each other, stalking the forest as were-tigers. In China and India, the royal tiger displaces the LION as Lord of the Land Animals: a slouching, strolling, sneering, snarling, black/gold amalgam of the antithetical energies of Sun and Moon. Immense mystery and might burn in the seething soul of this massive, lawless creature.

And this is just the introduction and opening paragraph of one chapter! I have no idea how much of the book he actually completed. I hope there is enough that it can be published someday.

I know Ian believed in an afterlife and, as Martin Anderson says, he was passionate about it . (He told me the same story of being prodded in the back by the spirit of Shostakovich.) But, in Ian's case, that made things harder, not easier. Ian was a gnostic. According to his beliefs, this world and the next are filled with darkness and evil, demons that can do harm to those who are not on their guard. To commit suicide under such circumstances was an act of both desperation and bravery. But he also believed that beyond these levels of shadow and pain, there ultimately lay a home, a place of peace and love. Ian expressed many of his personal beliefs in the article he wrote about Nick Drake, "Exiled From Heaven:the unheard message of Nick Drake". I was very pleased to hear that this article was being included in Ian's last book The People's Music. Even though I shared with Ian my feeling that he may have placed too much emphasis on his own beliefs, the piece stands as the only comprehensive theory of Nick Drake's work that has been written and it illuminates the heart and soul of both men.

Anderson's quote from The Observer about Revolution In The Head sums up Ian's greatest gift as a music journalist: "Best of all, the book drives you back to the music itself with fresh ears and understanding". This, for me, is what made Ian such an outstanding music critic. Even though he was always present in his own writings, as a listener and as a commentator, there was no ego about it - it was all at the service of the music. When I finished reading one of Ian's pieces - whether he was writing about Laura Nyro, Shostakovich, or Love - I wanted to rush back to the music and listen again. Invariably I heard more, appreciated more, became more because of what Ian had written. This is the standard by which all music criticism should be measured. It is not enough to write a 'Don't Give Me This Album For Christmas' review, no matter how clever the writer is. What is important is the music, that's what Ian was telling us over and over. Listen to the music, that's where the answers are.

Copyright 2003 Robin Frederick. Also Copyright 2003 Martin Anderson. Copyright 2001 Ian MacDonald. All rights reserved.