GrowlMail on Snow Leopard: A Temporary Fix
[Update: Hunter Ford has taken the time to extend my very basic script so that it includes the details of the sender and an extract of the text of the mail in the Growl notification. Head over there and grab the new script: it's way better than mine.]
If you use GrowlMail, you’ll be disappointed to learn that it doesn’t work on Snow Leopard yet. Since I keep my dock hidden, without GrowlMail I don’t know that I’ve received mail unless I roll over the dock, which is frustrating and adds a little bit of background anxiety to my day.
While the awesome Growl team are working on a fix, here’s a small AppleScript that I wrote to give me a notification whenever a mail arrives. It’s less functional than the full thing because it doesn’t tell you anything about the mail other than it has arrived.
There’s no title, summary or who it’s from like there is with GrowlMail, but that’s good enough for me as a stop gap. If you figure out a way to include those details, I’d love to hear about it though.
Anyway, the script.
tell application "GrowlHelperApp"
set the allNotificationsList to {"New Email Arrived"}
set the enabledNotificationsList to {"New Email Arrived"}
default notifications enabledNotificationsList icon of application "Mail"
notify with name "New Email Arrived" title "New mail" description "New mail arrived." application name "Mail Notifier"
end tell
Copy that into AppleScript Editor (as it is now called in Snow Leopard), or you can download it from here. Save it somewhere sensible (I used /Library/Scripts/Mail Scripts)
Then, add a rule to Mail for every mail that arrives and have it run the AppleScript. Here’s a screenshot:
And that’s all there is to it. Hope you find it helpful.
Karajan’s Last London Concert
Just before Christmas last year, as I was putting the finishing touches to my family’s presents, I noticed a CD with Herbert von Karajan’s name on it. It was a
recording of his final London concert, given on 6th October 1988 at the Royal Festival Hall, in which he and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra played Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht and Brahms Symphony No 1 in C minor
To understand how much this concert meant to me at the time, it’s important to realise just how big Karajan was. We’re used to the idea that ‘classical’ is in terminal decline, and there are very few household names left, but at the time of his death Karajan had sold more records than Michael Jackson – 115 million of them. That’s a staggering statistic, even when you account for his vastly longer career (his first recording was made in 1938 and his last in 1989, so 50 years, give or take).
I became a Herbert von Karajan fan in the early eighties. At the time he was easily the most powerful and famous classical musician then living, and he released dozens of his recordings every year. He was reputedly responsible for Sony introducing the CD before they really wanted to, and Karajan announced that he would only record for labels that issued his performances in the new format. His wonderful live recording of Mahler’s 9th Symphony was a CD-only release, and the biggest reason I bought myself a CD player.
Towards the end of his life, Karajan conducted fewer and fewer concerts, and only a handful of those were outside Berlin, Vienna and Salzburg. He came to London in 1987 with an all-Brahms programme, but I was still at school in Somerset at the time and couldn’t think of a way to buy the tickets and get to London and back without getting into serious trouble. My friend Matthew (who sadly died a few years ago) made it because his brother Paul was at college and managed to get the tickets. I have no idea how he got permission to go to London. Maybe he went without permission, although that would have been an almost unthinkable thing to do.
By 1988 I was at Trinity College of Music in London, and once again there was a Karajan concert. I saw the advert in my parents’ copy of The Times but really there was no need to advertise – getting tickets was a near impossibility.
Matthew and I decided that we would have to sleep outside the RFH to get returns. We duly turned up at about 10pm with some pretty useless sleeping bags and tried to get some sleep. We were hassled throughout the night by people who thought we were homeless (this was Thatcher’s Britain), and somehow made it through to the morning. Shortly after 8am the next person joined the queue. The box office – which in those pre-refit days was downstairs – opened at 9:30 by which time the queue had grown considerably.
There was almost immediate excitement: they had some returns. Reluctantly, we had to pass on them: they were £80 each (about £150 in today’s money), and well out of our price range. We wondered if anyone would bother to return tickets that we could afford – if they were cheap enough for us to buy, maybe the people who had bought them would see it as too much hassle.
But we were wrong. At about 10am, three £10 tickets came in, the exact number we were looking for. Looking back, it’s strange that the RFH didn’t operate a one ticket per person policy, which is standard today, but it’s lucky for us that they didn’t. We handed over our cash – it was only a month into the first term, so I actually had some money – and didn’t really know what to do with ourselves. Standing there waiting for the assistant to hand us the tickets was like waiting to see if you’d been given a loan by the bank: that feeling of being totally in some else’s power for just a few minutes, with them having no conception of how important their decision is to you. There could be no real objection to us buying the tickets but, as students, we were very new to the idea of being adults, and used to being despised as spongers.
Suddenly we had the entire day to wait for the concert, which we hadn’t planned for. I think I went back to my halls of residence (such a grand term for a shithole) and slept for most of the day. Later, we met up with Paul and headed for the concert hall. We walked in through the ticket office entrance just to see if the queue was still going; with only an hour or so to go to the concert, it was coiling itself around the building. We found it within ourselves to have a little gloat.
Going up to the bar area, it became obvious that something wasn’t right. Eventually, there was an announcement over the PA system: the orchestra’s instruments had been delayed in getting through customs in France. They hoped that the instruments would arrive within the hour. Deflated, and convinced that I’d now never get to see Karajan conduct, we tried to think of things to do that didn’t involve talking about where the instruments were, with little success. At a loss, I went up to the hall itself to have a look at the stage, which was laid out for the concert, but without Karajan’s special rostrum that he had used since his back operations in the early 80s. I knew that with no special podium there would be no concert.
Gradually, there started to be some activity on the stage and finally, excitingly, Karajan’s podium was brought in and placed at the front. The excitement that had turned to despair returned at an even higher level, and there was an audible change in the conversations going on around the hall. A quasi-religious experience was about to begin.
I was fascinated by the idea that he was in the building. Here, in the same building as me, breathing the same air. It hardly seemed possible that Karajan would descend from his lofty Olympus to come to plain old London, never mind that I was about to set eyes on him.
Karajan was a phenomenon throughout his career. Always controversial, both on and off stage, he was reviled by a great deal of the music business and much of the press. His performances were ‘too smooth’, there was ‘no sense of the journey taken’, a ‘luxury view of a piece’. He was contrasted, unfavourably, with his predecessor at the Berlin Philharmonic, Wilhelm Furtwängler. The famous ‘Karajan Sound’ was too plush, too generic.
But Brahms was, whatever your attitude to Karajan, at the centre of his repertoire. He’d conducted the first symphony perhaps two hundred times or more. He always conducted from memory, which was comparatively rare at the time, and the Berlin Philharmonic were easily the greatest orchestra in the world. If there was a piece to hear Karajan conduct, it was this.
But, before the Brahms came the Schoenberg, a late flowering of romanticism before the great schism that was introduced with the tone row. Karajan had made a well-regarded set of recordings of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern (although today these sound almost unbearably lush to my ears), but he had not conducted any of these works for many years.
The orchestra had taken the stage – no stupid tradition of the concert master (i.e. leader) entering separately in Berlin – and all was quiet. But still he kept us waiting, waiting, waiting. Eventually, the curtain parted, and the tiny, crippled figure of my hero emerged, supported by two acolytes. The orchestra stood, and the entire hall stood and cheered. You very rarely see standing ovations in classical concerts, and I’ve never seen one before the concert started before or since. It was a tumultuous reception, not like for a rock star, but astonished, reverent, respectful, thankful.
Karajan eventually reached the podium, acknowledged the ovation, turned and schooched himself back onto the podium. Having obtained silence from the audience, he raised his arms and began.
The Berlin Philharmonic strings make an astonishing sound. It’s earthy, rich, precise and heartfelt. Even when they play quietly, their sound is intense, like a wonderfully smooth double espresso. This is true even today, when their sound is much less distinctive that it was, but at the end of the Karajan era it was at its most pungent.
Verklärte Nacht starts very quietly, with violas and basses to the fore. It was a thrilling sound, enough to give me goose bumps all over. I was very close to tears. Karajan’s interpretation had changed little from the recordings made in the 70s, but it had acquired a greater urgency and commitment. Surprisingly, it lacked the incredible polish and aloofness of Karajan’s recordings – at this stage there were almost no non-pirated live Karajan recordings available, so one took on trust that the sound in concert was similar to that in the studio. Not so: it was white hot, and often came close to spiralling out of control. The orchestra displayed an astonishing commitment to every note, with every member being fully engaged.
When you see orchestras today, you rarely see the back desks of the strings look like they care. Further towards the front, the commitment levels seem to rise, but even then, it’s nothing compared to Karajan’s Berlin Philharmonic. They moved almost as one, each of them fully in command of their instrument, their instruments an extension of themselves.
The first half was over, and I have no idea what I did. No memory at all. Normally, I will stay in my seat during an interval because it helps to clear the mind for the second half, and is the quietest place you can be at the time. I don’t know if that’s what I did then.
The stage and auditorium filled up again for the second half. Brahms Symphony No 1: at the time, my favourite piece. It’s intensely serious, magisterial and noble. It’s also very beautiful. Musicologists will tell you that Brahms had made several unsuccessful attempts to write a symphony – one of which became his first piano concerto – and that he spent years writing and honing this one. It has a distinct architecture, with the two outer movements being of similar length and character and the two inner ones also being of similar, shorter length.
The piece starts with a portentous, doom-laden pounding on the timpani, with an expansive strings and woodwind accompaniment. In Karajan’s performance, this was like some pounding at the gates of hell: terrifying, intense and thrilling. After this introductory section, the movement continues into a conventional sonata form, but again seemingly weighed down by fate.
This is where criticisms of Karajan completely disintegrate. The idea there is ‘no sense of the journey travelled’ is nonsense. The first movement of Brahms 1st symphony was an emotional slog, the sound intense and immediate, the balance immaculate, the detailing perfect. But at no stage did it feel predetermined.
The inner movements are a haven from the weightiness of the outer ones, and the second in particular is of great beauty. As an oboist, I was driven mad wondering how the Philharmonic’s principle oboist, Hansjorg Schellenberger, could produce such an exquisite sound, so poised, so ethereal. I still have no idea.
The third movement, dominated by a theme in the clarinets, is more lilting and charming, but is extremely short. It ends ambiguously, as if scared off by the hulking mass of the final movement.
Like the first movement, the last begins in ominous fashion, again with timpani to the fore. Karajan’s timpanist produced an extraordinary power from his instruments, enough to cause physical recoil from the intensity of the sound. It’s a movement dominated by two themes – both very famous. The first of these is nearly always compared to the sun bursting out from behind a cloud, and is played on the horn. It’s a transcendent moment, and in Karajan’s performance it was a revelation. There was a sense of the sound blooming, as if the horn player was at the limit of his physical capacity.
For me, the most thrilling moment of the entire symphony is the entry of the trombones. They have sat idle for the whole of the piece to that point, and enter with a powerful, noble, poised chorale. It’s an earth shattering moment. It’s impossible to convey how awe inspiring this moment was – there was a sense of such retrained power, that one had a foretaste of what was to come.
The movement is episodic, and builds its tension by consistently refusing to turn to the darker theme when it seems it must. As the tension builds, so the pastoral string theme returns, and all seems well. But every time, the brass chorale reminds us of the coming battle.
For me, the movement kicks into gear with a beautiful, rasping entry in the violas. Suddenly it’s clear that this is the attempt on the summit, that there will be no more returns to easy, comfortable themes. Victory must be fought for with every ounce of strength.
How to explain the performance from here on? Music naturally makes my heart beat faster, but a great performance, full of momentum and power makes it go wild. I start to feel my pulse all over my body, and I become seized with a desire to move, as if I’m in chains. The music pins me to the seat, and my pulse rises and rises and rises. It’s a thrilling sensation, and not one that can be induced by recorded music, or just any performance. Sometimes it happens against expectations, at a concert I expected to be disappointed by, sometimes it refuses to happen when it seems that it must. I can only explain it as a direct physical connection to the music.
Maybe this is what people call ‘tunnel vision’. I become fixated on a point – usually the conductor’s back – and obsessed with urging the performance on in my mind. Only once – this concert – has the orchestra exceeded what I thought was possible. The frenetic intensity of the last few minutes of the symphony were, without question, the most intense moments of my life. I was crying uncontrollably, both with happiness at actually experiencing this unbelievable sound and with grief at the knowledge that I would never hear anything like it again.
I remembered an interview with an Olympic gold medal winning athlete in which she was asked what they were thinking as they stood on the podium to receive their medal. She said: “This is the most important moment of your life. Make sure you remember it.” This thought popped into my head. I was carried away in pure sensual enjoyment of the sound, and in that state I would forget! I had to remember what this sensation was like, and I would have to compare every moment of my future life to these moments.
The orchestra’s commitment, so impressive earlier, had now become utterly frenzied, almost self-destructive. There was a headlong dash for the end. The sound that a great orchestra produces is incredible. Bear in mind that every single player is a brilliant soloist, each capable of playing the hardest concertos in the repertoire. Each has performed, rehearsed and practised the piece for hours and hours on end. They have become practically unable to make a mistake. When they are inspired to play beyond themselves by a great musician like Karajan, the experience becomes incredibly intense. But when such a great musician lets them entirely off the leash, gives them their head, the result is indescribable. The sound became all encompassing, gigantic, oppressive, utterly thrilling. It felt like a physical weight had been placed on my chest, and the sound itself seemed to course through me. I was transported, delirious.
Only in the final few bars of the symphony is it clear that the result will be victory. The trombones are triumphant, and the entire orchestra blazes. One hundred musicians play as loud as they can, in complete abandon. It seems literally unbearable, and then, gloriously, triumphantly, it is over.
Even at a football match, I’ve never seen anything like the reaction that Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic received that night. It was sheer ecstasy, shouted out by two thousand people simultaneously. I said that standing ovations are rare, and that’s true. What’s also true is that they gather momentum. First one or two people jump up, then more join them. As the conductor leaves and then returns to the stage, more people stand and eventually a majority of the audience are on their feet. What happened for Karajan was quite different. The entire audience leapt from their seats immediately, and a enormous roar went up. As he slowly shuffled off his bike seat and turned to face the audience, the noise increased until it was an absolute tumult. People had their hands over their heads, applauding as though they’d just seen the greatest goal ever scored, their mouths open, their faces streaked with tears, astonished at what they had just seen and heard.
In the stalls, people started surging down to the front of the stage, throwing flowers into the orchestra, their flash bulbs popping relentlessly. Karajan stared into the applause as though he was standing on the prow of a ship in a massive gale, blinking slowly. He seemed slightly nonplussed. Maybe he had been so inside the music that he had forgotten there was an audience? It seemed plausible given the intensity he had achieved.
The ovation went on for several minutes, and Karajan made the painful journey off and then back onto the stage again. The noise didn’t abate for a moment, as if the audience wanted to keep the performance itself going. Eventually, the concert master signalled the orchestra that he’d had enough, and each member of the orchestra shook hands with his neighbour (they were at that time all men), and left the stage. In Europe, the audience frequently continues to clap and demands the return of the maestro, but in Britain, we give up as soon as it’s clear there won’t be an encore.
We sat in stunned silence. We had heard a miracle, an impossibility. I was seized by the certain knowledge that I would never hear anything remotely like it again. And that’s true today. I’ve been to some genuinely great concerts since – Abbado’s Mahler 7th in Berlin, his Mahler 2nd, 3rd and 9th at the proms, and the 3rd again at the Festival Hall, Simon Rattle’s Turangalîla at the Proms, Temirkanov’s Shostakovich 10th at the Barbican, and so on. But none of them has stayed with me like Karajan’s Brahms 1.
Listening to the CD now is fantastic, and gives me a picture of my mind twenty years ago. It’s an intense experience, and perhaps more brilliantly played than I remember. But what can never be recreated is the sense of overwhelming awe, or powerlessness in front of this astonishing sound. In one sense it’s gone – as Barenboim says, there is nothing left of music once it’s stopped – but in another it lives on inside me. It was an experience that can never be matched, and one that no other art can deliver. It’s why, despite all my reading, music is a fundamental part of my being in a way that literature can never be.
Karajan showed me what can be done, and for that I will be eternally gratefully to him. He was, despite his many faults, a great, great musician. A genius, in fact. May he rest in peace.
