Slovenia Notebook

Last week I headed to Maribor in Slovenia for a music festival featuring the Australian Chamber Orchestra under the directorship of maestro Richard Tognetti, the virtuoso violinist. I even briefly performed a couple of Edith Sitwell poems to music by William Walton, but my efforts were at the beginning and end of a long programme featuring the New York avant-garde of the Sixties, including a work by John Cage which contained a long movement of complete silence disturbed only by the sound of the audience leaving. I think I once read that Cage believed there to be three different kinds of silence required by his music: the silence of expectation, the silence of appreciation and the silence of paralytic boredom. I’m not sure about the last.

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‘Enjoy the rest of your day,’ said the young woman behind the desk at my Slovenian hotel last night. It is a sad fact of modern life that everyone seems to speak the same language and the jargon of the Slovenian hospitality industry conflates with that of San Francisco, Brisbane and Reykjavik.