научно-популярный текст

Поэтический текст

Carol Rumens

Unplayed Music

We stand apart in the crowd that slaps its filled glasses

on the green piano, quivering her shut heart.

The tavern, hung with bottles, winks and sways

like a little ship, smuggling its soul through darkness.

There is an arm flung jokily round my shoulders,

and clouds of words and smoke thicken between us.

I watch you watching me. All else is blindness.

Outside the long street glimmers pearl.

Our revellers’ heat steams into the cold

as fresh snow, crisping and slithering

underfoot, witches us back to childhood.

Oh night of ice and Schnapps, moonshine and stars,

how lightly two of us have fallen in step

behind the crowd! The shadowy white landscape

gathers our few words into its secret.

All night in the small grey room

I’m listening for you, for the new music

waiting only to be played; all night I hear nothing

but wind over the snow, my own heart beating.

Прозаический текст

Bernard Maclaverty

Grace Notes

The first time she saw the Chinese composer Huang Xiao Gang was at a composition workshop in the University. Because the public were to be admitted, it was not in the Music Department but in the lecture theatre overlooking the main quad. Through the window Catherine could see the green of the clipped lawn and the laburnum and cherry trees in full blossom and the cloisters beyond. She thought it would make anybody Chinese feel at home. It was a warm sunny day. The Prof came in with several other men and walked to the rostrum. Huang Xiao Gang was in the middle of the group. The first thing that struck Catherine was his height. She had expected someone small but this man was over six foot – thin and wiry – in his early fifties, although he looked boyish. His hair was black, turning to grey, and short – so short it could not be described as a haircut – more that his head had been shaved some time ago and the hair was growing back. The Prof introduced him to the audience of about thirty. He told them that Huang Xiao Gang had only yesterday flown in from Toronto, where he now lived, so he was still suffering from jet lag. He had been born in a remote province of northern China and the only music he had heard before reaching manhood was ritualistic – funeral music, wedding music. It was only very much later he heard Western music. The University Music Department was more than privileged to have such a man address them.

Left alone on the platform Huang Xiao Gang looked shyly down at his feet and began. He was a beautiful man with an open, immediately likeable face and smile. His English was extremely good. One pronunciation threw her. Peach. She thought he was referring to the fruit but he said it several times and she realised by the context what it was. For him peach and pitch were homophones.

He began by, not dismissing the conservatoire approach, but by putting it in its place. A three- or four-year old child with an innocent ear could produce things every bit as interesting as a Music Professor. There were smiles and nudges and glances at the Prof to see if he’d taken offence. Huang Xiao Gang talked about pre-hearing and inner hearing and later about categories of sound like peach and rhythm – random or otherwise.

He invited about ten students, including Catherine, on to the platform to do some vocal improvisation. They sat in a half-circle around him, five boys and five girls. He talked about the invisible disciplines of Taoism – the interaction of the two cosmic forces, the yin and the yang – the feminine and the masculine. Do you compose the music or does the music compose you? Where are the notes between the notes? Graces, grace notes or, as the French would have it, agréments. Are you a conduit for the music? Are you the nib or the ink source? He asked the students on the platform to breathe quietly, then to increase the noise of the expiration of each breath. It was astonishing the way the audience were on the edge if their seats listening to the expulsion of breath by ten people as if it was a new sound. Huang Xiao Gang said, ‘It is like a class for future mothers.’

Then he interfered with the expelling of the breath, chopping it up into gasps with his hand. He conducted with his hands, diminuendo and crescendo. His gestures were functional but at the same time delicate. Beautiful. The slightest movement of his head to keep time. He asked the students if they could draw the sounds they had heard, put a shape to them. Catherine suggested that if she was to represent the chopping-breath sound it was, ‘Out there. The rhythm of the cloisters.’ Huang Xiao Gang nodded.

He then talked about pre-hearing, asked the students to think about the shape of what they were going to improvise. Each contribution was to have a head, a body and a tail. Silence could be any part of the sound. There were four stages – first they had to, in silence, think about what sound or sounds they were going to make. Then they had to perform it. Having performed it they had to register and remember it. Lastly they had to do it again.

He asked Catherine to do this. She thought, then she gasped. A sigh, belted out sharply. Huang Xiao Gang said he was strangely moved by it, said, ‘Ah what a sigh is there.’ Called her Lady Macbeth. Catherine knew what he meant. Yet it was perilously close to being laughable. The courage to risk being thought pretentious. But when he said it – it was with a smile and he got away with it.

Later Catherine began improvising with Huang Xiao Gang, alternating ‘breath sentences’. Silence was part of hers and there was a mix up. They both waited. And everyone waited. Two chess players, both polite and patient thinking it’s the other’s move. The silence went on and on and on. For a long time. Then he turned to Catherine and they both smiled, realising their mistake. It was like when she’d pressed the piano keys as a child and no sound had come. Then they did it again, this time correctly, and she was amazed at how complete a thing it was. A series of sounds, formed, swished, swift – the way a series of brush strokes made a Chinese ideogram.

‘A composer does not grub around changing this note and trying that note instead. A composer hears the thing in his or her head and writes it down.’

научно-популярный текст

In a world of 7 billion people how can we protect wildlife?

By John Scanlon

Secretary-General CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora)

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/30/7-billion-people-how-protect-wildlife-endangered-species

Consumers and collectors want sturgeon caviar, snakeskin bags, shark meat and fins, wild snowdrop bulbs, precious rosewood furniture, and quality agarwood oil, as well as rare birds, reptiles, cacti and orchids. But they rarely stop to think about their origins. There are now over seven billion people consuming biodiversity every day in the form of medicines, food, clothing, furniture, perfumes and luxury goods. Demand for products drawn from nature is increasing, and with it pressure is growing on some of our wildlife species.

Our capacity to harvest from the wild has no limits, and modern transport has no frontiers. There are 1.1 billion international tourist arrivals a year, 100,000 flights every day, and 500 million containers are shipped a year, allowing wildlife products to reach the four corners of the earth, legally or illegally. The tensions between boosting global trade, promoting development and conserving wildlife persist, in what sometimes seems like a set of objectives that are pulling in opposite directions.

But we can also see examples where competing demands have been reconciled, such as through well-regulated trade, under the CITES treaty, of wild animals and plants, such as in the wool of the vicuña, made into fine suits; meat of the queen conch, eaten as a delicacy; the skin of the alligator, made into watch straps; or the bark of the African cherry, turned into prostate medicine. Each has benefited both the species and local communities and their development.

Illegal trade, worth up to $20bn a year, is now at an industrial scale, driven by transnational organised criminals

Wildlife-based tourism has also greatly benefited from these strict trade controls by ensuring that the wildlife that underpins this lucrative and expanding industry is protected. The mountain gorilla is a wonderful example, where enhanced enforcement and well-managed tourism has seen gorilla numbers climbing.

In the right circumstances, trade can be an incentive for managing wildlife sustainably. It can provide positive economic benefits for local communities, as we have seen with the vicuña, where the numbers of wild animals have risen from 6,000 in the late 60s to more than 400,000 today. Close to 1,000 people in one Peruvian village alone are employed in the trade of its fine wool. But it can also be a threat to wild populations of animals and plants and their ecosystems if it is not sufficiently regulated or controlled, poorly monitored and managed, or conducted at unsustainable levels.

Illegal trade, worth up to $20bn a year, is now happening at an industrial scale, driven by transnational organised criminals. It robs local people of livelihoods and countries of revenue, as well as of their natural and cultural heritage and the associated tourism potential. It can also become intertwined with legal trade, as we have seen with python skins, posing challenges for authorities and consumers in determining legal origin. It is pushing many species towards extinction.

We also know that great conservation gains of the past can come under renewed threats, as is the case with the rhino in South Africa. Rhino poaching there was stable at about 10 a year in the decade to 2007 and rhino numbers were increasing. But then poaching increased sharply to around 1,200 last year, putting these hard-won gains at risk.

Over the same period we have seen a surge in the illegal killing of the African elephant and trade in its ivory, which peaked in 2011 with an estimated 30,000 elephants being slaughtered for their ivory, putting certain populations at imminent risk of extinction.

How do we approach the legal and sustainable utilisation of wildlife in an increasingly crowded and interconnected world, where transnational organised criminals target high-value species, and where there are differing perspectives over how wildlife is utilised?

Contemporary solutions do exist. The international community has a legally binding agreement responsible for monitoring and responding to unsustainable levels of trade in wild animals and plants and to illegal wildlife trade. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora - CITES - deals specifically with individual species that are, or may become threatened through illegal or unsustainable international trade, including listed timber, marine and aquatic species, by strictly regulating such trade; we now record over 1,000,000 trade transactions annually. Commercial trade may also be prohibited, as is necessary, such as for elephant ivory and rhino horn, and from 2017 illegal trade will also be annually reported.

CITES has been greatly assisted by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which not only first promoted the need for such a treaty back in 1963, but which has continuously provided sound scientific assessments into its decision making processes.

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