Lighthouses at Dartington

Peter Maxwell Davies, one of Britain’s greatest living composers, was once the Director of the Dartington International Summer School. After a long absence of more than 25 years, this year he returned. He gave master classes in composing and the musicians present played many of his pieces in the Great Hall, which, notwithstanding its name, high windows and vaulted ceiling, is a surprisingly intimate place to listen to music. If you sit in the front row, you can almost touch the musician.

Maxwell Davies' music is not simple or romantic; harmony and melody are hard to get hold of and there is no soothing flow in which to get lost. Instead the music is abstract, mathematical and sometimes atonal. His music, some might say, is ‘difficult’. His explanations of his music, which precursed each piece played at Dartington, are, on the other hand, not difficult at all. They are simple, clear and almost always point to Orkney, a place, at least in his descriptions, which is so profoundly connected to the sea that the relentless sea makes sure the place never changes.

From his front window on Orkney Maxwell Davies can, he told us, see four lighthouses. That seemed an amazing fact in itself. Imagine living in a place so surrounded by and exposed to the sea and its dangers that four lighthouses are needed to protect boats from going to close to the rocks. The light from each lighthouse has a different pulse, as every lighthouse everywhere in the world does, making their lights instantly recognisable to the knowledgeable seaman. And so each instrument in his string quartet represented the pulse of one of these four lighthouses. One day he had imagined he had seen a mirage, a kind of vision: a fifth lighthouse had appeared in the bay outside his house, but this one was upside down, with its pulsing light at sea level. And that impossibility was at the heart of this piece of music.

At the climax, the music is shocking, convulsive and loud, like the vision of the upside down lighthouse. Having heard that explanation the music became straightforward, logical, easy to follow, evocative of a place the listener had never been, but now felt some intimate understanding of. Above all, the music seemed to suggest that lighthouses might appear for a moment upside down in the sea. Everything’s possible in music.

Man eating sharks in Recife

Recife has been a port since colonial times, but, as everywhere, a deep water port was needed to cope with modern container traffic. This was built some way from the city and the old port., with its rundown streets, customs house and red light district. Unfortunately the new port was built in the feeding grounds of the local sharks. So they moved down the coast to the golden, palm fringed beach right in the heart of the city, Boa Viagem. Now right outside the biggest hotels, the streaming traffic and under the bright arc lights illuminating the beach, the sharks hang around just beyond a low reef not far out from the beach. At high tide they can get over the reef and there are one or two breaks in the reef which hungry baby sharks can get through. The only food available is bathing human beings so every now and again they attack one of those with a view to eating them. But human beings are not tasty, so they generally just spit the flesh out and move on, still hungry. A lorry driver, desperate for a pee, went into the sea and relieved himself. That was a bad mistake. The smell attracted the sharks and one of them took a big bite out of his leg. So the moral of the tale is don't pee in the sea if there are sharks about.

Angels of Brasilia

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gerardlemos/sets/ for photos of Brasilia

Angels of Bogota

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gerardlemos/sets/ for photos of Bogota

Fishing for miracles in Bogota

Ingrid Betancourt was held hostage for many years by FARC guerrillas in the impenetrable lowland jungles in the east of Colombia. She was held in a distant jungle camp along with three Americans and seven Colombian soldiers. Hostage-taking has been one of the most effective tactics of the guerrillas in Colombia, not just FARC but also other paramilitary and Maoist groups. Taking hostages has dual benefits. Considerable sums are raised in ransom money, some paid, as it were, below the counter by worried, wealthy families. The second benefit is sowing fear and anxiety in the civilian community going about their day-to-day business. Some of the kidnapped were ordinary people, chosen by the upmarket brand of their car, whom the guerrillas hoped came from prosperous and privileged families and may therefore command larger ransoms. The market, so ubiquitous, even has it place in the world of hostage-taking. This semi-random approach to the choice of civilian hostages came to be known by the darkly ironic name of ‘miracle fishing’.

Even though FARC activities have been much curbed and their leader is dead, many other paramilitaries group are still active. Some say that the price that the wildly popular but aggressive President Uribe has paid for putting an end to negotiations with FARC and seeking to defeat them militarily is that other paramilitary groups operate with impunity and sometimes with covert official support. The main losers are the peasants, turfed from their land by intimidation. Two thousand people are still believed to be being held as hostages, 700 of them by FARC. The latest estimates are that about 30 hostages are soldiers in the Colombian army and two politicians remain in captivity. FARC maybe in retreat and the security situation much improved, but the war is not yet won and the consequences of lawlessness, crime and corruption will be a long time in the eradication.

As the world now knows, Betancourt and the other hostages with whom she was being held were rescued in a James Bond-like mission. Undercover Colombian army officers, operating on intelligence acquired over many years with foreign help, found the guerrillas’ hideout in the jungle. The guards at the camp were persuaded that the army officers were in fact also guerrillas under orders from headquarters to move the hostages to an even more remote camp close to the Venezuelan border. One of the hostages, Lieutenant Malagon, had been keen not to submit to the Stockholm syndrome, in which captives start to identify with their captors (most famously, Patty Hearst). So he took every opportunity to assert his true identity. On seeing the fake guerrillas arriving in the helicopter, believing them to be real guerrillas, he said “I am Lieutenant Malagon of the glorious Colombian army”. So convinced were the guerrilla captors that the men who had arrived by helicopter were their own kind that two of them went into the helicopter with the hostages. Once the helicopter was airborne the rescuing soldiers abandoned their cover and revealed their true identity. It was their turn to say that they were soldiers of the glorious Colombian army. At this point Ingrid Betancourt, who unsurprisingly had been depressed for a long time, burst into tears.

When the soldiers had been taken hostage they spoke no English. They had been taught English in the long tedious hours of captivity by the three American hostages and in return had taught them Spanish. Since being released the soldiers have gone through all the ‘detoxification’ procedures with psychologists and the army, particularly with a view to curing any lingering traces of the Stockholm syndrome. They are now to be re-commissioned. The legal advisor for kidnapped soldiers to the army suggested to them that they may like to continue their English studies in the rather more congenial but less dramatic setting of the British Council in Bogota. So yesterday, on a stormy afternoon in the upmarket Northern part of the Bogota, in the bright, glassy offices of the British Council, three officers were sitting at separate desks (presumably to avoid plagiarism; standards must be maintained!) taking their assessment test to check their current level of English alongside teenage students. On the surface the scene could not have been more humdrum. But the youngsters recognised these three soldiers as former hostages because they had been extensively on television. Lieutenant Malagon has been nominated for Colombian personality of the year, along with Olympic medallists, sports celebrities and President Uribe. Whilst doing their own tests, the teenagers cast a furtive glance at the soldiers and raised a small smile, comparing the routine business of sitting English language tests at the British Council with the outrageous extremes of being held hostage in the jungle and being taught English by your fellow hostages.

I shook hands with Lieutenant Malagon and wondered at the extraordinary miracle that had been fished from teaching English.