Only connect
Peter Phillips
People who travel a lot are known to become sad people. The very bustle of it all may sound glamorous, until the arrangements go wrong; and then one discovers just how badly human beings can treat each other. The problem for musicians travelling around the world to work is the sheer number of hours spent doing nothing. Whether sitting in airport terminals cut off from one's luggage, or waiting backstage between rehearsal and performance nervously thumbing a book or magazine disinclined to eat or drink, or staring at the walls of another identikit hotel room at 3 a.m. unable to sleep because of jet-lag, it is the same thing: how to get through the hours and still feel one is living a useful life.
Not long ago the standard answer was to read novels, play cards with one's colleagues, do the crossword or watch television. In those days the state of permanent dysfunction and confusion described so well in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled, where every venue is interchangeable with every other and no one belongs in any one of them, was ameliorated only by the fact that the television programmes tended to be more regional than they are now. Of course there was CNN everywhere, but at least at the touch of a button one could tap into something local, if life had become repetitive beyond endurance. The other clue was weekends, when concerts for us tend to take place. In old-fashioned countries like Germany or those of Scandinavia the shops would shut sharp at lunchtime on Saturday and not open again until Monday morning. Since this also included shops selling any kind of alcohol, one did well to notice where one was. The US has always been the most accommodating place for the sleepless and disorientated, with New York City the sine qua non.
However now things are gloriously, most gloriously changed. Enter the full array of electronic gadgetdom: cell-phone, laptop computer, email, the Internet, CD-roms, DVDs. In a matter of a few months I have learnt the knack of having something compelling to do wherever I am. It is incredible to me that any of us survived under the previous regime. We must have been vegetables. Admittedly, what I am describing means that every place I visit has now become completely indistinguishable from every other, since I am engrossed in my portable world. My attendance at the local art galleries has dropped off, my interest in Gothic architecture has plummeted, but it doesn't matter because sightseeing was only an effort that one made consequent on being asked to give a concert, not an act of will to go to that place and check it out.
This new way of being has yielded some bizarre scenes. Everyone must be familiar with that moment of stepping off an aeroplane and turning on one's mobile, to see if it works. If what follows is a transport bus to the terminal building and it is crowded, the place will seem to be alive with the welcoming noises every portable phone makes as it connects to the local network. How joyful that communal moment of connection can be! The farest-out example of it for me was in just such a bus at 5 a.m. in Novosibirsk, Siberia last February. We may in our innocence think that Siberians have no money for such things, and even if they did the network wouldn't function. Not at all. Although it was so cold it was dangerous to hold the metal supports on the bus, and pitch dark outside, the place was vibrant with people pushing buttons and being welcomed (to do which they had to take their gloves off). I could have rung home there and then.
And then there was the time I watched Hitchcock's The Manxman on my laptop DVD player while being driven through the Libyan desert. I mention this slightly reluctantly, since 1 don't spend much of my professional time in the desert, and it is quite a sight. But the journey was to last ten hours and I knew that the battery on my laptop would only do about 90 minutes of DVD playing before needing to be recharged, so I watched it. I've become quite an expert on early film. More recently I have discovered the merits of Freecell: a card-game on my computer which obviates the need for colleagues to make up a four. Apparently every single game (and there are 32,000 of them programmed into the machine) is solvable. Just last night I was tearing into no. 20,145 in the mediaeval Song School in Norwich Cathedral. Sad? I've never been so happy.
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