Issue #2 : Los Angeles (part one)

This issue’s featured piece of music is:
Spem in Alium by Thomas Tallis
And the featured recording is by:
The Choir of King’s College, Cambridge; the Cambridge University Musical Society and Sir David Willcocks
Recorded in: 1965


A few weeks ago I was in Los Angeles, which was very exciting and glamorous, yes, especially since this was a week before the Oscars ceremony. But I wasn’t there for that. I was there to visit a Dr Who convention. And it gets worse, because I don’t even like Dr Who. In fact I hate Dr Who! I have a friend named Owen who is writing a book about his teenage lust for Dr Who, and he invited me along for his amusement. And he paid for everything, so I didn’t have to think too hard about whether or not to accept his invitation. Thus I flew halfway around the world (for what it’s worth we offset it) to hang out in the basement of the Los Angeles Airport Marriott Hotel for four days with a bunch of American Dr Who fans. (At this point you might well be thinking: hang on, Dr Who is an amateurish and resolutely English sci-fi series – why would there be a Dr Who convention in Los Angeles of all places? Wouldn’t Leamington Spa be more appropriate? Well quite. It’s hardcore, ultra-cult viewing over there, apparently. You could even swap that L for an N.)

The first day was great. I felt incredibly avuncular towards this tragic tribe of highly-strung and frighteningly obese nerds. There were all kinds of discussions and seminars and episode screenings in the numerous conference rooms (including a kind of teenage girls’ support group, all comforting one another on the recent departure of the Billie Piper character, whom they’d all just got to know, sniff), all of which I flitted around in a state of delighted, superior amusement. I even sat quite breezily through an extended interview with one of the actors who used to play Davros, throughout which at every mention of any specific episode (e.g. The Bananas of Jupiter), the audience would applaud wildly, merely out of delighted recognition. I bathed in all this, shaking my head and whistling phewee under my breath. The second day was still pretty funny: inspired by the previous day’s Davros interview, Owen spent $60 on a four CD box-set audio dramatization of Davros’s ‘early years’. $60! Oh how I giggled, although today with slightly less carefree abandon than yesterday. Day three was quite bad – I became rather grumpy (outside – wherever outside actually lay - it was sunny and 25°C). By day four I was heckling during the seminars; sneering openly at the chubby nerds; and refusing to wear my special conference badge. I had started drinking heavily and snapping at Owen - angry and bitter at the panoply towards which earlier I’d found so, erm, beguiling.

So on the afternoon of day four I escaped. And in a move perhaps illustrative of the overwhelming terribleness of proceedings at conference, Owen actually came with me. We hired a car and drove around much like a Snoop Dog Doggy video only without the bitches or the champagne or the weed or the hoes or anything at all really other than electric windows and a radio. As we cruised up and down Sunset Boulevard etc, and as there’s only so much classic rock radio the ears can take, I twisted the radio’s dial to a Los Angeles classical music station, and we listened to that instead. As we are rather old. And here, at last, is the rub: it was one of the most incongruous and plain wrong symbioses of music and environment it has ever been my misfortune to experience. Classical music and Los Angeles do not go together. Hell’s teeth, they grate. L.A.’s low-rise, low-slung, sun-baked topography, with its long palm tree shadows and rich blinking neons was actually constructed for the Eagles and the Doors and, ahem, Ratt. Classical music, with its spiky European intricacy just doesn’t fit here. Never have I been so aware of the unshakeable relationship between music and its physical origins. Classical music came out of mud and forests and rivers and mountains and villages and towns and spires and steeples and cold weather. It’s fundamentally European, and I don’t think I’d ever realised this to such an extent before. And for some reason this classical music station was only playing Baroque music, which was probably the worst and most inappropriate (read: elaborate) thing to be playing of all. It set all my teeth on edge. 
‘Is it just me, or is this music making you feel ill?’
‘Pardon?’ replied Owen, who sat in the passenger seat reading a thick Dr Who episode guide. ‘You’re feeling ill? Do you want to pull over?’
‘Never mind.’
‘Are you going to be sick?’
‘Never mind.’

We arrived at Santa Monica beach, and parked up alongside the pier. It was sunset. The Pacific Ocean glistened like black silk before us. Above, palm trees rustled in the evening breeze. I was about to switch off the engine, but then a piece of music came onto the radio and suddenly the whole atmosphere shifted – it was like the air around us began to hum, and indeed it had started to hum, as the music that was playing features humming. We sat and listened as if hypnotized. The sound came in, kind of, vertical stacks of backwards-gulped waves – it was clearly very ancient music, but it sounded disarmingly modern at the same time. It glimmered around us in quivering, crepuscular three-dimensional threads. We sat like this for eleven minutes watching the sun disappear, and at the end I turned to Owen with tears in my eyes (yes, again), and said: ‘That was one of the most spectacularly beautiful pieces of music I’ve ever heard.’ My voice was all trembly and everything. (You must understand I’d been locked up in a basement full of Dr Who fans for four days by this point. And by the way, the music was Spem in Alium, a forty-part motet composed by Englishman Thomas Tallis in 1570.)
‘Pardon?’ said Owen, looking up blinking from his thick Dr Who episode guide. ‘Did I miss something? Are you going to be sick again?’
‘Never mind.’
And so we went for a stroll along the pier and bought some giant straw cowboy hats which we then wore constantly, indoors too, looking like complete halfwits, like American tourists in London wandering around wearing plastic bobby helmets the whole time. Alright.

Download Spem in Alium for free here