'Sweet dreams are made of this'
Sunday Times Culture: Comment, 12 November 2006
The weight of history hangs heavily upon classical music’s shoulders. In the carefree, people-friendly world of popular music, Sandi Thom can sing ‘Oh, I wish I was a punk rocker (with flowers in my hair)’, not batting en eyelid at the absurdity or the historical inaccuracy of the statement. It mars no-one’s enjoyment of the catchy hit. But no such easy forgiveness is available in the classical world, where opus numbers, arcane Italian terms, obscure jargon and – let’s face it – pedantry, can interfere with one’s enjoyment of the actual music. Which is why I feel it is partly my job on television to blur these boundaries and to remove the mystique that can prevent a normal listener from surrendering to ‘older’ music.
However, it is has also been my aim to remind those whose first love is classical music that much popular, folk and world music is worthy of their respect, interest and investigation. In my forthcoming Channel 4 series, How Music Works, it has been my priority to demonstrate the techniques, tricks and rudiments of music through examples in every conceivable style of music. A rhythmic device might be heard in a rap by Twista, or an Invention by Bach. My hope is that musical complexity, cleverness and sophistication should henceforth never again be seen to ‘belong’ to western classical music, nor that uncomplicated, fun, easy listening should be seen to be the sole province of popular music. I do not believe there is, in fact, so mighty a gulf between the music of the classical masters and their modern successors in the popular field, but the gap in public perception of the two genres is canyon-like. And it is widening with every year.
Any survey of classical music’s place in contemporary culture is hampered by an endless supply of myths surrounding the subject. One such piece of hokum is the notion that ‘youngsters these days don’t like, understand or appreciate classical music’. First of all, there was never a time when all young people were into the music beloved of their parents, grandparents or distant ancestors. It is part of the point of being young to find your own music, preferably distinct from and definitely louder than that enjoyed by the previous generation. This was as true for Beethoven and his contemporaries as it is today. Still commentators bemoan the lack of classical music in the daily diet of contemporary youth. This is odd, since roughly ten times more young people take GCSE, AS and A level Music than they did 40 years ago and a fairly hefty slice of the syllabus is devoted to listening skills associated with western classical music. More young people play in orchestras, bands and other ensembles than ever in our history – by a long chalk – and much if not most of what they play is classical music. In 1960 theUKhad one specialist school for music. Now there are over thirty, as well as roughly 300 performing arts colleges and academies. I would go as far as saying the current generation of young people are probably the most musical who ever lived. That they like music from every genre is to their very great credit. Whilst classical music enjoys – overwhelmingly – the lion’s share of public subsidy to music, it is but one branch of the musical family and modern youngsters are right to see it as such. Given that the tax payers’ millions are mostly soaked up by preserving this, the heritage department of the music world, it is hardly surprising that young musicians are attracted to the grungier, more spontaneous parts of the contemporary live music scene. Just because a teenager doesn’t like Jane Eyre doesn’t mean she doesn’t like reading; Malorie Blackman, Philip Pullman or Tolkein will do fine. Bronte’s always there for later in life. So is Mozart.
This brings me on to my second myth, that the public at large have ‘gone off’ classical music. In the 1960s, between 300 and 600 thousand listeners might on average tune into the BBC Third Programme to hear a classical concert. Nowadays the loyal weekly audience for Radio 3 and Classic FM combined is in excess of 8 million. The idea, then, that fewer people listen to classical music these days is quite a big, absurd, out-of-all-proportion myth. Never mind that a third of the population hear Carl Orff providing climactic moments for the X-Factor week-in, week-out. Orchestral managers worry that the average age of audience members at classical concerts is either dwindling, or aging, or both. But they dare not confront one of the reasons for this.
To put it bluntly, in the 1950s going to an orchestral concert was one of only a few things you could do of an evening, so people who wanted a night out, who liked music but didn’t enjoy scratchy records, tinny gramophones or their claustrophobic sitting rooms, trooped off to the Town Hall to get a fix. Now there are loads of things to do with your evenings, thank God. But here’s the rub. There are more orchestras now than then, playing the same pieces to the same constituency, vying for the same celebrity soloists, competing with high-quality sound systems in every home.Londonhas 5 professional symphony orchestras. Five. It is a myth that only old people like classical concerts, anyway, as you will find at any Steve Reich, John Adams or Philip Glass performance. Younger audiences prefer younger music, that’s all.
There has been a trend in recent years to think of a new name for classical music, because advocates for it sense that the label sounds old-fashioned and frumpy. Alternatives such as ‘concert’ or ‘art’ music have been put forward from time to time, but one current favourite is ‘serious’ music. This is the third myth and it is a dangerous one. There is a streak of snobbery running through much discourse on classical music, a snobbery that looks down its nose at the whole paraphenalia of popular culture – its mp3s, downloads, walkmans, samples – as well as the kind of folk who enjoy it, and it is this snobbery that has tried to claim that classical music is more ‘serious’ than all those other frivolous forms – jazz, hip-hop, pop, world, musicals and so on. It is an insult to the brilliantly skilled and committed musicians in all these other genres but it is an insult that most of all damages classical music’s own reputation, since it confirms the prejudices of many – that classical music is an exclusive, lah-di-dah, Members Only club. A club that apparently decides what is musically serious and what is not. It saddens me that the beautiful, thrilling works of, say, Gustav Mahler, Gabriel Faure or Igor Stravinsky are tarred with this hoity-toity attitude. They are quite capable of standing on their own two feet; they do not need to be granted some badge of seriousness by anyone else.
People are afraid of the ‘insider knowledge’ that seems to be attached to the classical repertoire. I have done my best to chip away at this misconception in my TV programmes over the past decade or so, but it is an illuminating and refreshing experience watching, at the Schools Proms every year (Monday to Wednesday of this coming week at the Royal Albert Hall) hundreds of young musicians playing and hearing pieces of dizzying variety, back to back, devoid of historical or intellectual ‘context’. They experience the music without its programme-notey baggage: its opus numbers, its ‘schools of’ and its isms. Because the concerts are a deliberate mish-mash of classical and non-classical, the boundaries between styles lose their meaning. For a composer like myself it is a liberating reminder of what music at its best can be – abstract, emotional, free and endlessly surprising.
The Schools Proms are the best antidote I know to the grumpy resentment that occasionally attaches itself to discussions about classical music. More often than not when a major figure from the classical world pops up in the news it is to complain. Funding for the arts has doubled under Blair but the general public would never know it, the way famous conductors go on. Don’t get me wrong, complaint has its place in the world and many arts organisations do struggle to make ends meet, but the litany of woes that we too frequently hear about marginalisation, about how the British are not as interested in ‘high art’ as the Germans, about the Prime Minister liking rock (Oh, Crikes, crime beyond imagination!) and so on, only reinforce the public perception of a group of privileged artists for whom nothing is ever quite good enough. By contrast, pop, jazz and world musicians appear just to get on with the job in hand and – frankly – seem to be enjoying themselves rather more. This is what I have tried to capture in my latest Channel 4 series, How Music Works.
At its simplest it is an everyman/woman’s rudiments of music theory – the nuts and bolts of musical technique. But I wanted very much to demonstrate that these techniques are common to many different forms and traditions of music. I wanted someone whose passion was Hendrix to see what links Jimi’s chords with medieval church music, and for someone whose passion was Wagner to see that unresolved suspensions, his trademark, were still alive and well in the songs of Coldplay. Above all, I want music to be celebrated as a universal gift and, especially now, a common language whose magical vocabulary is still in vigorous use from Soweto to Salzburg, from Mumbai to the Rockies.
Howard Goodall