“Barmy.” That seems like a pretty good word for it:
Hundreds of schools have barred teachers from marking in red in case it upsets the children. They are scrapping the traditional method of correcting work because they consider it ‘confrontational’ and ‘threatening’. Pupils increasingly find that the ticks and crosses on their homework are in more soothing shades like green, blue, pink and yellow, or even in pencil. Some schools worry that red ink upsets students.
Traditionalists have branded the ban ‘barmy’, saying that red ink makes it easier for children to spot errors and improve.
Happy 200th, Fifth. Norman Lebrecht noted the 200th anniversary last week of the first performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.
The orchestra played badly, the hall was cold and audience tolerance was exhausted by an overlong programme.
But this was the night that the symphony shed its courtly deference and became a universal art form – a work that represented fate and the individual, and indicating that a free person can take control of his or her own destiny.
Greg Mitchell has more:
On December 22, 1808, Ludwig van Beethoven himself rented a hall in Vienna and promoted the concert to end all concerts: the debut, over four hours, of three of the greatest works in the history of music: his Fifth Symphony, the Sixth (“Pastoral”) Symphony, and the astounding Piano Concerto No. 4, plus the wonderful Choral Fantasia (forerunner to his Ninth Symphony).
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The reviewer for Leipzig’s Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung also observed: “To judge all these executed pieces is — after the first and only hearing, particularly since these are works by Beethoven, of which so many have been performed in one session and most of which are great and long–nearly impossible.
That’s a refreshing example of humility from a music critic.
