Katy Hamilton

On Thursday night, as I sat quietly scrolling through my Twitter feed, my brain partially occupied with thinking about all the stuff I’d been reading about Dvořák that afternoon in preparation for an upcoming City Lit course, I totally misread something. Or rather, my eyes skimmed across the text and, failing to make any immediate sense of it, mis-processed the information at hand. What it actually said was:

Badges at You Say You Want A Revolution #exhibition #London #V&A #1960s https://t.co/1kDjsIg9HW

— Fran Wilson (@CrossEyedPiano) 8 September 2016

Unfortunately (and I partially blame the K.J. Erben folk stories I’d been reading, which are pretty weird), what I therefore understood it to say was ‘Badgers you want at a Revolution’. Which is certainly an exhibition I’d go to, by the way. Just in case the V&A are stuck for future ideas.

But it got me thinking about mistakes and misreading. Last weekend, whilst at the Royal Musical Association’s Annual Conference, I attended a session dealing with contemporary music and the way it’s regarded  – not just by the media, but by the very people who are composing it and running the organisations which support it – and the need to treat it more positively and supportively. It was certainly an impressive panel to get the point across: composer Julian Anderson, Gillian Moore, head of music at the Southbank Centre, and the wonderfully deep-thinking and eloquent scholar Arnold Whittall. Amongst the various complaints put forward was the observation that all the standard texts on ‘Modern Music’ – including Alex Ross’s enormously successful and highly readable The Rest is Noise – contain factual errors. Why, our panel wanted to know, couldn’t these people get their facts straight?

As a colleague muttered to me afterwards, why does the contemporary music scene think it’s any more or less vulnerable to misinformation than any other? The difference, of course, is that there might actually be someone still around (whether it’s a composer’s offspring or the composer him/herself – ‘Modern Music’ covering a rather broad historical expanse after all) who knows when contemporary music specialists have got it wrong. Dvořák is unlikely to be tapping at my teaching room door next month, insisting that I’ve mangled his story. Unless Doctor Who is really, really bored right now.

Of course, this is why publishing companies employ proof readers, why authors have editors, why academic books have peer reviewers, why researchers might have research assistants… and so on and so forth. Still, mistakes do happen. If we’re lucky, we catch them. Like that time when I was about the fifth person to check a book proof immediately before it went to print, and the only one to notice that actually, that grumpy-looking guy’s name is not traditionally spelled ‘Beerhoven’. It can be a slip of the pen (or the typing finger), Freudian or otherwise; or a dodgy source you forgot to cross-check; or a misprinted year of publication somewhere else; or – and these are my favourite – mistakes that just keep getting passed along the line because no one has previously had the time/print space/energy/funding to unpick the jumble of half-facts. Scholars might set out with the best of intentions, but if you consider the amount of research that goes into every single book and article that’s out there, that’s an absolutely enormous body of facts to quadruple-check. Add in the pressure of meeting research assessment deadlines, attempts to maintain a work/life balance, and plain old having-an-evening-when-you’re-not-at-100-percent, and you can see how errors creep in. To err is human – isn’t that what Pope Alexander said?

However, there are some important distinctions to be drawn between accidental errors in otherwise well-researched texts, more fundamental errors which undermine the text’s usefulness, and entirely deliberate fact-twisting which puts personal agendas above any desire for accuracy or truth. (Readers in the UK won’t need me to explain that last one any further, having lived through the Brexit campaign.) Things with mistakes in them can still be useful. If they are really fundamentally flawed, they might tell you something about the author(s) or a common misunderstanding around a given subject. And this reveals, of course, the all-important lesson here: read critically. That way, if something is peppered with small mistakes, you can roll your eyes, pencil correct them if you need to, and move on. If there are so many of them that it’s like the equivalent of looking at someone whose clothes are so full of holes that they’re bordering on naked, maybe don’t bother reading that book again. If there are just a handful of errors, never mind. After all, if you go to a live concert and the performance is completely electrifying but contains a handful of bum notes, you’d be a fool to discount the entire event, wouldn’t you?

Ah, but I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: hey, the point is to read this book to find things out that I don’t know! So how am I supposed to know if it’s wrong or not?

Right, you’re going to have to help me with the next bit. Are you…

• Researching this for any kind of assessed thing, or for publication yourself? Then you should be reading more than one book on it! No excuses, buddy. Back to the library with you.
• Reading this out of interest in the topic, without further plans to write essays or books on it? Good for you. Well, if you’re that interested you’ll probably read another book and might identify the inconsistencies. If you’re not, you’ll probably forget quite a bit of what you read anyway, so no harm done.
• Reading this to find mistakes, but not a professional proof reader? Get out more. Seriously. You’re looking kind of pale…

You might think me terribly cavalier for being so unfussed at the prospect of People Reading Things Which Are Wrong. But dry, static facts in lists are not usually very easy to absorb and understand, and engaging narratives necessarily contain an amount of subjectivity and interpretation which others might not agree with. As I set about sorting out my notes on a nineteenth-century music history module I’ve been teaching for several years, I’ve looked over a number of texts – many familiar to me, some new – to see how they go about defining Romanticism and explaining how it came about. They are mostly written by extremely distinguished scholars and cultural historians. No two sources agree. Some strike me as more compelling arguments than others. Some incorporate events and anecdotes that others totally fail to mention. If you’re doing my course, you’ll get the chance to compare and contrast explanations; and if you’re not, and you pick one book out of the pile, you’ll still get a good enough outline to be going on with. We build our understanding of the world and everything in it as an incremental process, and that involves revising, as well as expanding and extending ideas and concepts that we already have.

So the question becomes one of responsibility, on both sides: that of the reader and the author. The author has a responsibility to convey a persuasive narrative which, ideally, should draw upon the best understanding of the facts that we have. The reader has a responsibility to recognise that authors are tricky creatures (I feel I’m allowed to say that, since I am one) with their own agendas and axes to grind, and that they may even be doing this without being aware that they are. The writer has a responsibility to think about what they are writing. The reader has a responsibility to think about what they are reading. So read widely, and deeply, and think as you do. That way, if you come up against something that you consider utter nonsense, you can either chuck it in the nearest paper recycling bin, or carry on perusing in the full and certain knowledge of what you’re letting yourself in for. Ask people for recommendations. Chat to your friendly local librarians. Join book clubs. Talk reading at the pub. Engage with the written word, in whatever ways you can, so that all those mistakes – and the bits that are right – are part of your experience of the world.

And if you see any badgers wandering around, looking like they’re spoiling for a fight… please, please drop me a line.